I Am Darknesse

This is the final draft of my previous story, ‘Behind the Eyes’ – which I have now removed.  The story began as an assignment for a Creative Writing course I was studying, and has since grown into something altogether much nastier!

I intend to write several more ‘Case Files’, which will effectively be self-contained stories, developing the larger story arc begun here.  Part 2, which I’m working on right now is provisionally titled, ‘A Gentleman of Providence’. By the way, the spelling of ‘Darknesse’ is deliberate, as will become apparent as you read.

I hope you enjoy it – part 2 is coming soon…

The Jonathan Trent Case Files Part 1 – I Am Darknesse

Copyright J.N. Thorpe 2009

You’re going to think that this is a joke. You’re going to think that at best I’m a liar, or a madman, or that all this is just some drug-fuelled fantasy. You’d be wrong. I shouldn’t be writing this all down. I could lose my job, or end up in prison. I don’t care. What I do care about is telling the truth, showing you a glimpse of the world as it really is, not the smoke and mirrors you think is real. I want to tell you why my best friend, Billy, is dead, and what happened to the woman he loved. I can’t tell you the whole story – only she can do that – and I can’t even think of her as human anymore.

My name is Jonathan Trent. Billy and I grew up together. At school he wanted to be a rock star from the moment he could play a guitar. I wanted to be the fifth Ghostbuster. Billy craved fame, fortune and girls – and he got them. I craved mystery, adventure and girls. I got a Masters in Parapsychology. Billy’s metal band have a platinum album and three world tours to their name. I have a government job in a damp, seedy office building with a department no one has ever heard of.

Billy and I drifted apart after he formed the band. He’d always be off on tour or something, and I’d be busy doing…stuff. Mostly standing in fields looking at crop circles, telling dumbfounded locals that it’s not a message from outer space, it’s a bunch of idiots with a bit of two-by-four, a length of rope and too much time on their hands. That’s what my department does. If there’s a report of an alien abduction, or a poltergeist, or baby-murdering Satanists, we investigate and uncover the truth. And the public gets told that it was all just a hoax, a false alarm. I’ve never once seen a UFO or a ghost, and the only devil worshippers I’ve encountered turned out to be teenage goths with a plastic skull and a bag of magic mushrooms. So when Billy phoned me out of the blue a couple of weeks ago, raving about ‘that thing behind the eyes’, I thought that he was on drugs. Which he was. There was more to it than that, though. And it all started with Liz.

I met her once, briefly, the last time I saw Billy, at the after-show party for one of his gigs. She’s tall, pale and elegant, with a shock of spiky, ice blonde hair, jade eyes and a silver nose ring. And she has a title – Lady Elizabeth Winterbourne-Strickland. She’s old money; the Winterbourne estate, in Dorset, dates back to Edward the Confessor. I did some digging into her background after Billy had called me. Unlike some of the society ‘it’ girls who flaunt themselves in the press, she has a brain, which she’s applied to acquiring a doctorate in Ancient Languages, no less. Smart, posh and beautiful – no wonder she caught Billy’s eye. She’s also the sole beneficiary to the Winterbourne estate. Her mother died giving birth, and her father died of cancer when she was nineteen. That was about all I could find out about her, though.

Billy had sounded pretty messed up when he called, and it took a while to calm him down. I agreed to meet up with him on the strength of a book he mentioned amidst his frantic outburst – the Voynich Manuscript. Google it, then you’ll understand why I was so intrigued. I’ve been interested in the manuscript since I first heard about it at university. It represents one of the world’s few enduring mysteries, and I do like mysteries. Sadly, though, my work has never presented me with any as tantalising as the Voynich Manuscript. Essentially, it’s a medieval text written in a strange script that looks like some kind of code or ancient language, and it’s full of odd botanical illustrations, astrological charts and other such weirdness. It was originally thought to have been written some time in the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon, the friar and philosopher. A letter attached to the manuscript’s front cover when Wilfrid M. Voynich first discovered it mentions a previous owner, who claimed that it was written by Bacon. That letter was written by Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague, who also said that the manuscript used to belong to Emperor Rudolph II. Interestingly, the astrologer, Dr. John Dee, stayed in Prague during Rudolph’s reign, and had quite a collection of Bacon’s books. So it’s possible that he was the previous owner, who sold it to Rudolph. That’s my theory, anyway.

To date, no one has ever managed to decipher the text, even though some people have spent years trying. So it was quite a surprise when Billy said that Liz had succeeded. If Billy’s story was true, then it was definitely worth pursuing. I remember having strange dreams that night, of traversing black gulfs of space at incredible speed, while nebulae swirled and galaxies wheeled around me. Then finding myself amidst some weird, alien landscape where the wind raged beneath a lurid, purple sky. Ancient metallic structures of monolithic proportions jutted from the ground like the claws of some vast monster. I awoke with a start, feeling confused and vaguely apprehensive. I’d been online, looking at some of the illustrations in the manuscript before I went to sleep, though, so I dismissed it once I’d had a good, strong cup of coffee.

Billy said to meet him at Liz’s place, Winterbourne House. A huge, sprawling monstrosity it is, too. I left work at lunchtime to avoid the rush hour traffic, and pulled up outside the gates of the Winterbourne Estate as the sunset turned the encroaching wisps of mist to a shimmering amber. The ivy covering the main hall’s facade and most of the two wings was tinged a pale gold. I half expected to be met by a butler as I climbed the steps up to the iron-studded doors. When I pulled the brass chain by the door, though, I was greeted by nothing but the evening mist pawing at me with chilly fingers. After about a minute, I rang the bell again. Still nothing. So I tried banging the heavy, iron knocker. The door creaked open – ominously. When you get a call from a friend in trouble and turn up at their place and it seems empty, but the front door’s unlocked, it’s not a good sign, is it?

Pushing the door open, I peered inside. The hall was in near darkness, with just the twilight coming in from two large windows on the landing to illuminate it. A huge staircase led up the landing, its bannisters ending in bronze lion’s heads that scowled impassively at me. It was like walking onto the set of a Hammer Horror film. Despite the circumstances, I couldn’t help but smile, imagining Christopher Lee as Dracula, descending the staircase with that crazed look in his eyes. Behind me on the wall was one of those old fashioned, round light switches. It didn’t work. I looked around downstairs, my footsteps echoing loudly on the tiles. In the kitchen I found a loaf of bread, green with mould. Again, not a good sign. The place had apparently been deserted for some time.

I called out, “Billy?” The sound of my voice echoing round that empty hall was disquieting. I headed up the stairs, which creaked with every step. I called Billy’s name again when I reached the landing, trying each door I found. They were all locked except for one. There was a gallery beyond it that turned left after thirty feet. I checked a few rooms on the way – store cupboards, guest rooms, nothing unusual. So I walked on, with a growing sense of trepidation. Like I said before, I’ve never seen anything in my job that was genuinely scary, but that doesn’t mean I scare easily. I’ve had a gun shoved in my face before, so ordinarily a big, old empty house wouldn’t even register. There was something about this place, though. Something I’d never encountered before. Not a smell, or a sound, just a tangible sense of dread.

Around the corner was a flight of stairs. From somewhere up above, I heard a repeated banging. I ran upstairs. There was something worrying about the urgency of that sound. Had Billy hurt himself? Was he lying prone and bleeding, unable to communicate except by thumping the floor? Or was it a headboard banging against a wall? That thought stopped me in my tracks. It would explain why Billy hadn’t come when I called out. Okay, poor choice of words there. I was beginning to feel a bit foolish for having let this place get to me. I called out again when I reached the next floor – just in case there was something going on that I didn’t want to walk in on. I tried the nearest door, which opened into a huge bedroom.

Broken furniture, empty bottles, cigarette packets, clothes, books and ornaments were strewn all over the floor. A silhouette obscured one window. I pulled out the torch I’d brought with me and shone it at the figure. It was Billy, sitting in the dark with his legs hugged tight to his chest, rocking back and forth idiotically. He didn’t look up at me. Whatever he’d taken, he was clearly shot to bits. He looked shocking. His face was grey, and filmed with sweat that matted his hair to it. He used to have dark hair. Now it was almost white. His eyes were so dark and bloodshot, it made my heart sink. What had he done to himself?

“Alright, Billy?” I said, in as casual a tone as I could muster. “You know, you should tidy up once in a while.” He didn’t respond. “This place looks almost as bad as you.” Still nothing. The Billy I knew would at least have smiled at that – or told me to bugger off. It wasn’t until I actually knelt in front of him and patted his shoulder that he even noticed me. Then he looked up so suddenly that I jumped backwards, tripping over a nest of tables. Not really the entrance I wanted to make.

Billy sounded – and smelt – like he’d been drinking solidly. For days. “I shouldn’t have called you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey,” I said, picking myself up off the floor, “it’s okay. Billy, whatever’s going on here, I can help. We can sort it out,” I said, trying my best to sound reassuring.

Billy just stared off into the darkness behind me.

“Who else was I gonna call?”

“Ghostbusters?”

He looked up at me then, his face blank, pasty and blotched. Sweat and drool dripped from his chin, and his head swayed as if with the effort of just focussing on me. Then he smiled, his eyes suddenly alive. He laughed – so loud that I nearly pissed myself. Howling with laughter, Billy fell sideways, knocking over an empty bottle. I started laughing, too, relief flooding through me – but not my pants, thankfully. Once we’d both calmed down, Billy didn’t waste time catching up.

“It’s Liz. It’s not her anymore. Jonny, she’s – I had to bolt the doors.” He pointed behind me, to a pair of sturdy looking, panelled doors. I shone my torch at them, and saw that they were indeed bolted, and a chair was wedged under the handles. I looked back at Billy.

“Liz is in there?” At that point I was starting to think the worst – that Billy, in some drunken, drug-crazed moment of insanity had attacked Liz. As it turns out, that wasn’t the worst, not by a long way.

“I had to stick the chair there, too – to stop it getting out,” he said, nodding, as if this was anything even approaching a reasonable explanation.

“Stop what getting out?” I said. “You mean Liz, right? Billy, what the fuck is going on? What have you done to her?”

He put his hands up at that.

“Me? I didn’t… she did it, Jonny. She did it to herself.”

“Did what? What did she do, Billy?”

It was a long time before he spoke again.

“The book. She read it. Aloud.”

“The Voynich Manuscript?”

Billy nodded.

“Okay, so she read a book – aloud – that no one before her has ever been able to translate, and you locked her in there?”

Billy nodded again.

“Look, Billy. If you two have had a row – I mean, is she okay in there? What’s happened?”

Billy shook his head.

“No. No, she’s definitely not okay.”

“Well then don’t you think you should let her out?” I was getting impatient by this point, so I walked over to the doors and shouted, “Liz?”

“No!” screamed Billy, and I heard a distinctive click. Slowly, I turned to see that that from somewhere amongst the mess he’d grabbed a double-barrelled shotgun, which he was pointing right at me. “Just sit down. Please. Just – just stay still, and I’ll explain it all, I swear.”

I did as I was told.

“For fuck’s sake, Billy!” I said, indignant, “I’ve been here five minutes and you’re pointing a gun at me? Shit! I thought you wanted my help!”

“I…” he began, then seemed to sag, exhausted. “I need her, Jonny. But she’s gone.”

“Billy, I’m sorry, but if Liz is… hurt. If there was an accident or something, I mean, you can tell me. You didn’t you shoot her, did you?”

Billy laughed at that – not out loud like before, but in gasping sobs that brought him limply to his knees.

“It’s not for her,” he said, “it’s for me.”

Billy swiped up a bottle of gin, and cracked it open. He took a swig, then offered it to me.

“We can’t let that – thing get out, Jonny – not now. It’s funny, you know? She was so excited when she found the key. From then on, she never stopped working on it, like all day and all night. I’d hardly see her, she was locked in there with that book all the time! And now…”

He started laughing again, on the verge of weeping. He wiped his eyes with back of his hand, and took the bottle off me.

“I don’t know what else to do. Should’ve stopped her. I didn’t know, though. Stupid!”

He banged the barrel of the shotgun against his head in an agony of frustration.

“Billy – why don’t you put the gun down now, yes? It’s okay, I’m not going to try anything.”

Slowly, he put the shotgun down next to him.

“She wanted to be the first. You know? It’s almost like – like she wanted it to happen.”

“What do you mean? What happened after she read the book?”

“I don’t know, not really. But she was gone.”

“Gone? Where?”

Billy took another swig of gin before answering.

“I was pissed off because she wouldn’t give it a rest and come to bed – you know? So I just got drunk instead. I find that alcohol, if taken in sufficient quantities-”

“Can produce all the effects of drunkenness!” we said together, laughing, though I felt that Billy was doing so for my benefit. There was a sadness, an emptiness to him I’d never seen before.

“So then what?” I asked, if only to break the silence.

“I kept drinking ’til I passed out. I sort of remember hearing weird noises in the night, though, seeing lights and stuff, but that could’ve been a dream. I woke up the next afternoon and the room was a mess. And Liz was gone. She left me a note, though.”

He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from the thigh pocket of his combats and passed it to me. I unfolded it and read it. It was in a shaky hand, scribbled as if in a hurry.

Billy

Don’t let me come back, no matter what. It’s not safe. It’s all true. Read my journal.

Forgive me – if you can. I love you,

Liz

“What did she mean: ‘it’s all true’?” I asked, reaching into the pocket of my jacket to pull out my cigarettes.

“You’ve got fags!” Billy’s face lit up.

I pulled one out for myself, then tossed him the packet.

“I’m so fucking glad you came,” he said, taking a long drag on his cigarette.

“So what was she talking about?”

“The manuscript. It’s like a guide book. Not really ‘Lonely Planet’ material, though,” he said with a brief smile.

“Erm, okay. Are you going to make sense at any point, or is this where you start talking about babel fish or something?”

“Look, I didn’t get all the details, right? Her journal’s in all different languages and there’s like, spells and weird symbols. You know she’s really into that – witchcraft and dead languages, all that shit?”

I nodded. “I looked her up.”

“You know she worked for you lot, then? For the government?”

This I did not know.

“I reckon that’s how come she found the key. You know – the cipher? She wouldn’t say how she found it – never told me what her job was, either. But in her journal she says she found the way to cross over.”

“Cross over? What do you mean?”

“To another world,” Billy replied, flatly. I couldn’t help but let out a derisive snort at that.

“Okay, now you’re just talking bollocks.”

“It opens a portal – I fucking saw her come back through it!”

“Alright,” I said, raising my hands. I thought it best to humour him, seeing as he appeared to be stark raving mad, and had a shotgun next to him.

“I was reading her journal, trying to figure out what she was on about, but I couldn’t. All that pagan mumbo-jumbo’s more your thing. So I just, like, waited around, got kinda bored after a while, so I did some K.”

“And then what?”

“She came back. There was this noise, like thunder, but backwards. And then there was this purple light – blinding – like a star. Then it all went quiet, and there she was. Only…” his voice trailed off as he watched the smoke curling up from his cigarette. He frowned, lips quivering. “It wasn’t her. I mean it was her body, but inside, behind those eyes, it was something else. Something…terrible. Just wearing her like a fucking glove puppet!”

“And you’re sure this wasn’t just some k-hole? I mean, that ol’ blind squid can mess with your head.”

“I wish it was, honestly.” His voice had dropped to a whisper, and he began to sob in phlegmy gasps. “I was scared, Jonny – really scared.”

“So you locked her in there? Fair enough. So how do you know she’s even still in there?”

“It bangs on the doors every now and then.”

“Was that what I heard on the way up?” I asked.

He nodded weakly. “At least it’s stopped shouting. That voice – it was making me sick. Like it didn’t know how to make her speak properly.”

Despite the sincerity of Billy’s words, I was sceptical. Can you blame me? Although he believed that’s what had happened, I still couldn’t rule out the possibility that this was all some hallucination of his.

“Billy, if you won’t let me see her, then at least let me talk to her, just so I can find out what she – what it – wants.”

Billy just glugged down more gin. “I know what it wants,” he said bitterly. He wouldn’t say any more on the subject, though.

“Okay, well where’s Liz’s journal?”

He looked around, then reached behind him, and picked up a notebook bound in red leather, which he handed to me. When I took it, I had a sudden flashback from my dream of that windswept landscape against a purple sky. I shuddered involuntarily. I suppose Billy’s talk of portals to other worlds was getting to me. I opened the notebook at random. Liz’s handwriting was a flowing, cursive script, neatly arranged on each page in perfectly straight lines, with all kinds of obscure notations and diagrams. I recognised a few Cabalistic symbols like the Tree of Life, as well as a few images copied from the Voynich Manuscript itself. There were references to John Dee’s work, as well as Roger Bacon’s and other philosophers, occultists and cryptographers. In particular, she made references to William Newbold, probably the most famous cryptographer to work on the manuscript. Newbold theorized that the last page of the manuscript contained the Latin phrase, ‘Michi dabas multas portas,’ which he translated as, ‘To me thou gavest many gates’. He used the Latin as the basis for a key to decipher the text. I got a bit lost at this point, but as far as I can gather, Newbold was looking at this from a Cabalistic perspective, in that he took ‘gates’ to mean paired combinations of letters, each combination having a particular value. Liz, however, implied in her notes that there was also a more literal meaning. These ‘gates’, according to her, are portals – doorways to other worlds that can somehow be activated, apparently just by speaking aloud the correct combinations of letters. By now I was totally mystified. The way that she described it all made it sound so simple, but also totally bonkers.

Billy’s gentle snoring distracted me. I looked up to see that he was slumped with his head on his chest, legs akimbo, and slowly sagging forward with each gurgling breath. He’d helped himself to another cigarette while I was reading, and this had burned down to the filter. I thought about phoning the police then – though I was reluctant to do that if I could sort this mess out on my own. Instead, I reached forward slowly and carefully, then grabbed the shotgun. Thankfully, Billy just kept on snoring. With the shotgun placed safely out of his reach, I returned to the journal. It got more absurd and perplexing the more I read. She alluded to John Dee’s notorious conversations with angels, which she had interpreted as aliens. She’d even gone so far as to say that the ‘shewstone’ that Dee used to contact these aliens, was invented by Roger Bacon. I knew that he’s credited with having invented the magnifying glass, but Liz had wondered far into the realms of fantasy by now. I half expected her to be quoting Gandalf next. Instead, as if this wasn’t weird enough, she’d linked the horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft into all of this. Lovecraft reputedly got his inspiration for the infamous ‘Necronomicon’ from the Voynich Manuscript. I’m quite a fan of his stories, so I’d heard about this already. Liz, though, couldn’t leave it at that. According to her, Lovecraft first heard about the Necronomicon from his wife, Sonia Greene, who was Aleister Crowley’s ex-girlfriend. Crowley, apparently, owned a copy of the Necronomicon, which had once belonged to John Dee. So Liz was implying now that even this book is real. I couldn’t take much more, so I flicked to the last few pages.

Billy was still snoring, and I didn’t want to wake him since he looked like he hadn’t slept for days. Otherwise I would have asked him to point out where Liz’s actual translation was amidst all this nonsense. So far I’d found nothing. Then, I found something entitled the ‘Wyrd Cant’, which Liz had attributed to Dee. It was gibberish – about thirty lines of it. Phonetically, it was complex, and seemingly unpronounceable. Presumably, this was a spell to open one of the ‘portals’ that Liz had referred to. On the opposite page, were Liz’s own words:

I have done something terrible. I opened the portal. Had I known what awaited meon the other side, I would never have taken that journey.

When I’d stepped through, I remember my excitement on seeing the sky – it was a livid purple, shot through with whorls of dark, swirling clouds. The air was thin, rarefied, and had a strange, chemical tang to it. The ground beneath my feet was a dusty grey. Arranged around me in a circle roughly fifty metres across were huge, curving metallic spires like the claws of some great beast, and beyond that I saw a filmy surface of some sort of dome, that sparked and crackled with someexotic energy as dust was thrown up against it by the winds outside.

At this point I had to stop reading. This was the scene I saw in my dream. I felt as if I was suddenly infected with the same madness that had clearly overtaken Liz and Billy. How could this be real? I wondered if perhaps this whole thing was a dream, or some kind of psychotic episode, and right now I was, in fact, languishing in some psychiatric institution, drooling and giggling to myself. No, I told myself – get a grip. I carried on reading:

At the base of each spire was an aperture, so I headed toward the one directly ahead of me. The substance of the spires was smooth and cold against my fingers. Inside the aperture was a spiralling ramp, leading underground, which I followed. I couldn’t tell how deep it went, but I was walking for a long time before it opened out into a vast, egg-shaped chamber of the same cold, smooth metal, lit by some unseen source. The chamber itself was warm, the air humid, and I could feel a throbbing through the soles of my feet, like a generator, deep in the bowels of the structure. Arranged in concentric rings around the chamber were hundreds of large, transparent domes of different sizes, with strangely organic looking pipes extending from them and snaking across the floor. Inside the domes there was a bewildering variety of plants and animals – some of which looked familiar, others less so. At regular intervals around the chamber’s curving wall, there were more doorways, interspersed with circular screens. These appeared to display constellations, star charts and nebulae. I made my way carefully to the centre of the chamber.

I could not tell if these specimens I passed were alive or dead, until, moving through the macabre collection, I saw something familiar. It was a woman, curled up in a foetal position inside her dome, as if she were simply sleeping. As I watched her chest did not expand as it would were she breathing. Her skin had a healthy olive colouration, though – not the pallor of a corpse. I rapped my knuckles against the cylinder, but she did not move or respond in any way. I tried not think about the implications of this, and what danger I might be in.

At the centre of the chamber was a huge contraption suspended from the ceiling. It had a bio-mechanical aspect, like some ornately wrought spider, constructed from the guts of Victorian automata. Pipes, tubes, valves, manifolds and other obscure apparatus hummed and clunked and hissed. Beneath it was a system of interconnected, circular pools of a viscous, dark green liquid. As I watched, the liquid in the pool nearest me began to move as if protean, extending a glistening pseudopod toward me. I barely had time to take in my surroundings, however, before I became aware of a sudden pressure upon me, as if gravity had drastically increased around me. My limbs felt heavy, and I found it a struggle to lift my head. What I saw when I did so sent a thrill of panic through my nerves. One arm of the machine, having the appearance of a grapple, was descending toward me. Helpless to resist, I felt cold metal close around me, and a tube tipped with something resembling a hypodermic needle snaked down. I found I could not even scream as it punctured my neck. Moments later, my consciousness failed me.

My next memory was of waking in the study. I was naked and shivering, my throat horribly parched and sore. I had no recollection of what had happened to me, but decided that we must have had some ketamine the night before. I rose shakily, and headed into the bedroom to find you sprawled on the bed, snoring. I kissed you. Did you feel it, Billy, in your dreams? I know now, that I can never kiss you again. As I climbed under the covers next to you, the memories of that place beyond the portal came back to me in hideous flashes. And with them I felt something stir within my mind – something alien and sinister. Though I tried to relax, to dismiss the sensation as the last vestiges of some drug fugue, I found myself unable to quash the disturbing thoughts and sense impressions that lurked at the edges of my awareness. So I picked up my journal to write all this down.

My hope is that this will go some way to explaining my actions, though I know now that they have caused me to forfeit not just my life, but your love. I will fight for as long as I can. I can’t hope for your forgiveness, Billy, not now. I fully expect you to hate me for what I have done, and it is nothing less than I deserve. It is only now my memory of events has returned to me, that I realise how foolish I have been. I find myself struggling – fighting, now – to maintain my own volition, to remain myself.

Reading Liz’s account, I felt that dread coming over me again, pernicious and unrelenting. Normally, I’m not really one for overblown prose – I leave that to writers like Lovecraft – but at this point I felt so totally freaked out by what I was reading that I can’t think how else to describe it. I had to put the journal down again and light a cigarette – my hands shaking as I did so. I tried not to think about my dream, and about the illustrations on the pages of the Voynich Manuscript, and how they related to what Liz had just described. Of course, I couldn’t stop myself, though. And I knew that this still could all be just some madness of hers, and the scenes of my dream just a coincidence, but that dread had taken hold of me. I suppose it served me right, really. All these years I’d been wanting some mystery, some magic, a hint at the otherworldly. I’d craved it like a drug, like it was some god-given calling. And I’d always been disappointed. Well, now it seemed I had one, and it scared the shit out of me. I reached for the gin bottle at Billy’s side and slugged it back greedily until my heart stopped hammering and my hands were steady again. So. What should I do? In the absence of any other ideas, I carried on reading. That was why I’d come here, to discover the truth.

I skimmed over the next page, forcing myself not to get drawn in, keeping in mind that I was looking purely for evidence that Liz had, as Billy claimed, translated the manuscript. I couldn’t find anything definite – just allusions. I noticed though, that Liz’s handwriting was becoming less controlled, shaky and smudged. There were spelling mistakes, and sentences that trailed off into nonsense or scribbles. Her final entry began with a quote from one of Dee’s angel conversations:

The Earth laboreth as sick, yea sick into death.
The Waters pour forth weepings, and have not moisture sufficient to quench their own sorrows.
The Aire withereth, for her heat is infected.
The Fire consumeth and is scalded with his own heat.
The Bodies above are ready to say, We are weary of our courses.
Nature would fain creep again into the bosom of her good and gracious Master.
Darknesse is now heavy and sinketh down together: she hath builded herself, yea, I say, she hath advanced her self into a mighty building, she saith, Have done, for I am ready to receive my burden.
Hell itself is weary of Earth: For why? The son of Darknesse cometh now to challenge his right: and seeing all things prepared and provided, desireth to establish himself a kingdom; saying, “We are not stronge enough, Let us now build a kingdom upon earth, and Now establish that which we could not confirm above.”
And therefore, behold the end.

Liz’s last few words were a desperate scrawl, gouged into the page rather than written:

I can feel it. I do not have much time. This other life we made, that grows inside me – what will it become? Remember me as I was before this, Billy, when I was still myself, and could still tell you that I love you. My mind is besieged, the enemy at the gates, and I am sinking down.

I am Darknesse, and I am ready to receive my burden.

And that was it. Nothing more. I stared at that page for a long time, chewing my bottom lip as I contemplated those last words. ‘I am Darknesse’. At the time I had no idea what it was supposed to mean. I wish that was still the case. Eventually I put the journal down and lit another cigarette, sitting there in the gloom while Billy drifted ever deeper into sleep. It seemed that there was only one thing more to do, so when I’d finished my smoke, I stood up, rubbing some life back into my cramped legs, and paced over to the double doors. When I pulled the chair away, it’s feet scraped noisily on the wood-panelled floor, but a quick glance in Billy’s direction was enough to satisfy me that he was still asleep. I put the chair to one side, then reached up to unbolt the doors. It took an effort of will to steady my fingers around the big, wrought iron key, and every snick of the lock as I turned it made my thumping heart skip a beat. With shaking hands I took hold of the door handles, my guts squirming as that dread clutched at them. I took a deep breath to calm myself, which didn’t really work, so with a whispered, “Fuck it”, I pulled the doors open. And yes, they creaked ominously.

“Stop!” Billy shrieked at me. I spun around, startled, to see that he had the shotgun aimed at me. Stupidly, I’d left it on the floor. He shot me. The force of the impact threw me into the darkness. At that range he could have blown my head off, but whether because of our friendship of more than twenty years, or just because he was a mess, Billy shot me in my left arm. Now, though, I wish to Christ that he had shot me in the head. Not that it didn’t hurt being shot. I blacked out. Not very Fox Mulder, is it?

When I came to, I discovered that I was handcuffed by my left wrist to a radiator under the window. The handcuffs were adorned with fluffy, pink feathers. To Billy’s credit, he’d tied a makeshift tourniquet round my left arm, which had gone completely numb.

“Nice handcuffs,” I croaked. “Classy.” My throat was parched, and I felt nauseous, which was hardly surprising. Billy was pacing around the room, the shotgun resting in the crook of his arm, the bottle of gin in his other hand.

“I’m sorry, Jonny. Really, mate, I am. I didn’t mean to shoot you – I guess I kinda freaked out a bit,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “But this thing has to be stopped. If it gets out of here…” He left the sentence hanging, and handed me the bottle instead. I took a slug of it, which helped to quell the nausea a little.

“So, what now?” I asked, noticing that he had left the doors to the study wide open.

“Now”, said Billy, crouching down to help himself to another cigarette, “we wait. I sorta figured it must be coming and going. Sometimes I’d hear it chanting, and then there’d be a light,and a noise like a hurricane. Then it’d all go quiet. Guess it’s got stuff to do.”

He settled down cross-legged opposite me, and passed me the cigarette he’d just lit, taking another from the packet for himself.

“So you’re going to shoot her, too?” My voice was thick from the smoke.

“What fucking choice do I have? All this time, I’ve been sitting here, scared out of my mind. I should have killed it as soon as I knew it wasn’t Liz. I can do it now, though. I’m not a coward, Jonny. That body it’s walking round in – the lips I kissed and told me she loves me, that womb that’s carrying our child. Ain’t her anymore.”

“Jesus Christ – Liz is pregnant?” I remembered the last entry in her journal then.

“Not anymore. It’s just meat. Like I said, she’s gone.” When the end finally comes for me, the look on Billy’s face right then will be the last thing I see, I’m sure. In his mind, he had nothing left to live for, and it showed in his eyes. Right then, though, I didn’t understand.

“Billy, you can’t kill her – not if she’s pregnant.”

“It’s gone!” he shrieked, spraying spittle like venom. “It was our child. Now it’s gone, too.”

“What?”

“That thing, inside her – behind the eyes, they put it in her. That’s what they want. I finally worked it out. It’s how they breed, Jonny. They want to spread, take over. You get it now? It’s up to me to stop this fucking thing right here! I see that now.”

Typical. Not only had Billy got to have more success, fame and sex in his life than me, but now he was stealing my thunder – my thing. And I was the one handcuffed to a radiator with my head pounding and my left arm completely numb, not understanding what the hell was going on. Then events took a turn that rapidly brought me up to speed.

There was a noise – soft at first – like leaves rustling. It rapidly grew to a whistling, then a shriek. I could see a purplish light flickering on the walls of the study. Billy stood, shotgun levelled. The shrieking grew to a terrific, breath-taking roar of rushing air that blew gouts of grey dust into my face and hurled rubbish across the floor. Billy was struggling to stay upright. By now the light had intensified to a brilliant, violet luminescence. Then, suddenly, the gale stopped. And there was that feeling again, that stifling dread.

I couldn’t see what Billy could, but I saw his features contorted into a scowl of fear and hatred. I won’t forget that look, either.

“Back! Stay back!” he spat into the darkness of the study.

I started giggling. I couldn’t help it. It must have been all the endorphins pumping through me, but when I heard Billy say that, I just felt for all the world like I was in some budget horror film. Then I saw what Billy was seeing. It was Liz – or what remained of her. By the light of that hellish, purple glow, I could see that there was something wrong with her. Her naked body was a pale grey, and there were ugly, blotchy bruises on her arms and legs, where she’d been forcibly restrained. A thick, red scar ran from her belly button to her groin. She moved like she was sleepwalking, swaying as she stepped forward. She turned her head in my direction. Her eyes were dead. There’s no other way to describe it. Whatever spark of animation, of humanity that exists within all of us, it was gone. Then she spoke to me.

“You,” she said, in a voice as empty as an open grave, “you, are the one we have been waiting for. You will join with us.”

“You stay away from him!” Billy shouted, jabbing the shotgun at her.

The thing that was Liz swivelled its head in his direction. A sardonic smile twisted its mouth, then it turned away from him, stepping toward me. Billy shot it in the head. That’s another image that will stay with me, though I wish I could forget it. The right side of its head exploded, the force of the impact punching it sideways into the wall. It collapsed against it, those lifeless eyes staring right at me. Then it pulled itself upright, spilling gore from its ruined skull as it got to its feet. It turned to Billy, giving me a view right into its head. I retched, but somehow managed not to puke over myself.

“Look what we have made.” It gestured to the study. Stepping unsteadily from the purple glow was a naked child – a boy who looked to be about five years old. Its skin was as pale as the Liz-thing’s, its eyes just as empty. It stopped in front of Billy, who dropped to his knees, whimpering.

“What have you done?” Billy cried.

The boy-thing stared at him, its face expressionless. Then as Billy knelt before it, shaking and sobbing, it placed its hand on his head.

“You will understand,” it said, its young voice utterly alien. Billy gasped, his mouth and eyes wide in terror. Then the child removed its hand, and Billy sagged, slack-jawed and twitching.

“Billy? Billy!” I shouted, but he didn’t reply, or even look at me.

The Liz-thing watched as his spasms subsided, then knelt beside him. For a moment I thought that perhaps there was some spark of humanity left in there, because it put its lips to his. As it worked its mouth against his, though, Billy’s flesh began to shrivel. To my astonishment and horror, the gaping wound in what was Liz’s head healed over in a matter of seconds, leaving only a bloody smear. The Liz-thing stood, letting Billy’s lifeless body crumple. It touched its fingers to the side of its head, seemingly satisfied. I’m not a religious man at all, but I offered up a prayer then for Billy’s soul, to whatever gods were watching. The Liz-thing regarded me with a curious frown, cocking its remade head like a bird watching a worm. Then it took the boy-thing’s hand, and they both stepped forward.

“You will come with us,” they said in unison.

I’m proud to say that I still had enough dignity and composure left to refuse.

“Like fuck, I will!” I shouted, and wrenched at the handcuffs, glad that I couldn’t feel the harm I was doing my wrist. In true horror film style, the Liz-thing and its offspring took their time, staggering ponderously toward me. I stood, and yanked and twisted the handcuffs with all my strength. There was a crack, and I toppled backwards, cracking my head on the floor. For a few moments all I could see was a red pulsing network of veins like a road map of London. Then when my vision cleared, I was looking up into the Liz-thing’s empty eyes.

“This is the world that awaits you,” it said, and placed its hand on my head.

I don’t remember much after that. I have vague impressions of floating toward those metallic structures, lit by that baleful purple, and of half floating, half falling down a spiralling corridor, and through chambers of biological specimens. A sensation of drowning, my world turned a bilious green. Then millions of shiny, black insect things, crawling around inside me, under my skin, behind my eyes. I remember I screamed.

The next thing I recall was running, out into the night that reeled and swam around me as I stumbled through trees, barely noticing as their branches tore at me. I don’t know how I’d escaped, but I remember shrieking, howling with laughter as I leaped and stumbled through the woods. I ran and ran, with my lungs burning, my heart about to burst and my legs pounding limply against the earth. I don’t know how long I’d been running, but eventually the darkness closed around me. I came to in a hospital bed.

There were questions to answer. I’d been put in a private room, and while I lay there, trying to remember the events that had brought me here, I had a visitor. He was in his fifties, dark hair slicked back. He had the kind of face that people normally warm to – soft, grey eyes, slight jowls forming around a mouth lined from smiling. He had the look a priest, though he was dressed in a dark, pin-striped suit. His voice matched his face: sympathetic, comforting.

“Good morning, Mister Trent. My name is Doctor Harman. How are you feeling?”

“What’s it to you?” I might have lost my memory, but I still had my wits about me, and I could tell straight away that this bloke was no doctor. Everything about him said spook. Probably M.O.D. You get to recognise the type in my line of work.

“Oh, come, now, Mister Trent. There’s no need to be suspicious. I only ask out of concern for your health.”

“Bollocks! What do you want?”

He looked down at the floor before replying, a rueful smile playing at his lips.

“Mister Trent, we both know that you paid a visit to your friend, Billy McCoy at Winterbourne House yesterday.”

“Do we? And who is ‘we’, anyway?”

“Please, Mister Trent. You left your car there. You received a phone call from Billy the night before. What was it he said that made you drive all the way down there to see him?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business. It’s a free country, after all, isn’t it?” I didn’t much feel like talking right then. Least of all about things that made me shudder, and knotted my stomach with an inexplicable dread when I tried to recall them.

“Mister Trent, your friend is dead. I apologise for putting it so bluntly, but since your fingerprints are all over the murder weapon, your freedom is by no means a certainty.”

“Murder weapon? But I didn’t -”

Then I realised where this was leading. Sure enough, ‘Doctor’ Harman opened his briefcase, producing a sheaf of papers.

“I’m sure that you’re familiar with this,” he said, handing me the papers. It was a copy of the Official Secrets Act, that I’d signed the very first day on my job. Although my post isn’t that sensitive, I’m required to keep my mouth shut when I’m told to. By writing all this down, I’m pretty much sticking up two fingers to the whole thing. Like I said at the start, I don’t care. At least I’ll be safer in prison, anyway. I handed the papers back.

“Look,” I said, “I honestly don’t remember what happened, okay?”

Harman put the papers back in his briefcase, then took out something else.

“Indeed. Then perhaps this will remind you,” he said, placing the object on the bed. It was Liz’s journal. I didn’t need to read it to know that it signified something awful. I lay there, open-mouthed and shaking as horrible images flashed through my mind. I whimpered, barely capable of speaking.

“I – I’m sorry. I can’t…” was all I could manage to say.

“Well, then, Mister Trent,” he said, getting up again, “it would seem that our business is concluded. For now.” He picked up the notebook, and put it back in his briefcase. “If, however, you should happen to remember anything – no matter how trivial – I suggest that you contact me straight away.” He reached into his breast pocket and handed me his card.

“I will,” I lied.

He looked at me for a long time then, as if considering whether or not to have me shot.

“Mister Trent, I would like to offer you an opportunity. You are a competent investigator, highly regarded within the service. You could go far, should you so desire. All we require is your cooperation. I don’t think I need to remind you of the alternative. Good day, Mister Trent.”

I was discharged after a couple more days. My arm was healing nicely, and there was no lasting damage – not physically, anyway. A week later, I went to Billy’s funeral, and stood at the back, out of the way. He was a popular bloke, and the church was packed with friends, family, ex-girlfriends and fans. A drug overdose – that was the coroner’s verdict. I wasn’t about to dispute that, not in public, anyway. The police had issued a statement to the effect that they were concerned for Liz’s safety, and appealed for information as to her whereabouts. That was all. No one mentioned her at the funeral, thankfully. As I watched the coffin going into the ground, though, I knew that I wouldn’t be safe for long from that thing wearing her body, and its bastard child. I can feel them out there, haunting my dreams. I find myself wondering what the Liz-thing meant when it said that I am the one they have been waiting for. I suppose it doesn’t matter now. I don’t plan on finding out anytime soon. I’m guessing that Harman has Liz’s journal safely under lock and key. If I had my way, I’d burn the fucking thing – and the Voynich Manuscript, too. Had she really deciphered it? Or did she just get lucky by finding something in a basement filing cabinet of some nameless government department? Her notebook gave no clues. I’d seen no evidence there at all. I wonder if she’d kept another notebook. Maybe it’s hidden somewhere in Winterbourne House. Of course, that’s another thing that I’ll probably never know. Unless, of course, I take up Harman’s offer. If you ask me, this is all their fault. If John Dee’s ‘Wyrd Cant’ had been destroyed, then none of this would ever have happened. There are secrets that our governments keep from us, and with good reason. I wonder how long they can keep this a secret, though. And I wonder how long it will be before the end comes, before the darkness. I know one thing, though: It won’t be long before they come for me, to take me away, where I’ll be safe. I hope.

END OF PART 1

I AM DARKNESSE

by

J. N. Thorpe

You’re going to think that this is a joke. You’re going to think that at best I’m a liar, or a madman, or that all this is just some drug-fuelled fantasy. You’d be wrong. I shouldn’t be writing this all down. I could lose my job, or end up in prison. I don’t care. What I do care about is telling the truth, showing you a glimpse of the world as it really is, not the smoke and mirrors you think is real. I want to tell you why my best friend, Billy, is dead, and what happened to the woman he loved. I can’t tell you the whole story – only she can do that – and I can’t even think of her as human anymore.

My name is Jonathan Trent. Billy and I grew up together. At school he wanted to be a rock star from the moment he could play a guitar. I wanted to be the fifth Ghostbuster. Billy craved fame, fortune and girls – and he got them. I craved mystery, adventure and girls. I got a Masters in Parapsychology. Billy’s metal band have a platinum album and three world tours to their name. I have a government job in a damp, seedy office building with a department no one has ever heard of.

Billy and I drifted apart after he formed the band. He’d always be off on tour or something, and I’d be busy doing…stuff. Mostly standing in fields looking at crop circles, telling dumbfounded locals that it’s not a message from outer space, it’s a bunch of idiots with a bit of two-by-four, a length of rope and too much time on their hands. That’s what my department does. If there’s a report of an alien abduction, or a poltergeist, or baby-murdering Satanists, we investigate and uncover the truth. And the public gets told that it was all just a hoax, a false alarm. I’ve never once seen a UFO or a ghost, and the only devil worshippers I’ve encountered turned out to be teenage goths with a plastic skull and a bag of magic mushrooms. So when Billy phoned me out of the blue a couple of weeks ago, raving about ‘that thing behind the eyes’, I thought that he was on drugs. Which he was. There was more to it than that, though. And it all started with Liz.

I met her once, briefly, the last time I saw Billy, at the after-show party for one of his gigs. She’s tall, pale and elegant, with a shock of spiky, ice blonde hair, jade eyes and a silver nose ring. And she has a title – Lady Elizabeth Winterbourne-Strickland. She’s old money; the Winterbourne estate, in Dorset, dates back to Edward the Confessor. I did some digging into her background after Billy had called me. Unlike some of the society ‘it’ girls who flaunt themselves in the press, she has a brain, which she’s applied to acquiring a doctorate in Ancient Languages, no less. Smart, posh and beautiful – no wonder she caught Billy’s eye. She’s also the sole beneficiary to the Winterbourne estate, her parents having been killed in a car crash when she was seventeen. That was about all I could find out about her, though.

Billy had sounded pretty messed up when he called, and it took a while to calm him down. I agreed to meet up with him on the strength of a book he mentioned amidst his frantic outburst – the Voynich Manuscript. Google it, then you’ll understand why I was so intrigued. I’ve been interested in the manuscript since I first heard about it at university. It represents one of the world’s few enduring mysteries, and I do like mysteries. Sadly, though, my work has never presented me with any as tantalising as the Voynich Manuscript. Essentially, it’s a medieval text written in a strange script that looks like some kind of code or ancient language, and it’s full of odd botanical illustrations, astrological charts and other such weirdness. It was originally thought to have been written by the Franciscan friar and philosopher, Roger Bacon, though that’s never been proven unequivocally. There is also some speculation that it was once owned by Dr. John Dee, the Elizabethan court astrologer, and that some time between 1584 and 1588, he brought it to the court of Emperor Rudolph in Prague. Dee was a collector of Bacon’s works, and a catalogue of his library, compiled in 1583, lists thirty seven such books. When Wilfrid M. Voynich originally discovered the manuscript in 1912, he didn’t immediately notice an accompanying letter. The letter was written by Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague, and stated that the manuscript’s bearer, who sold it to Emperor Rudolph for the sum of six hundred ducats, believed Bacon to be its author. Interestingly, there’s no evidence as to who that ‘bearer’ was.

To date, no one has ever managed to decipher the text, even though some people have spent years trying. So it was quite a surprise when Billy said that Liz had succeeded. If Billy’s story was true, then it was definitely worth pursuing. I remember having strange dreams that night, of

traversing black gulfs of space at incredible speed, while nebulae swirled and galaxies wheeled around me. Then finding myself amidst some weird, alien landscape where the wind raged beneath a lurid, purple sky. Ancient metallic structures of monolithic proportions jutted from the ground like the claws of some vast monster. I awoke with a start, feeling confused and vaguely apprehensive. I’d been online, looking at some of the illustrations in the manuscript before I went to sleep, though, so I dismissed it once I’d had a good, strong cup of coffee.

Billy said to meet him at Liz’s place, Winterbourne House. A huge, sprawling monstrosity it is, too. I left work at lunchtime to avoid the rush hour traffic, and pulled up outside the gates of the Winterbourne Estate as the sunset turned the encroaching wisps of mist to a shimmering amber. The ivy covering the main hall’s facade and most of the two wings was tinged a pale gold. I half expected to be met by a butler as I climbed the steps up to the iron-studded doors. When I pulled the brass chain by the door, though, I was greeted by nothing but the evening mist pawing at me with chilly fingers. After about a minute, I rang the bell again. Still nothing. So I tried banging the heavy, iron knocker. The door creaked open – ominously. When you get a call from a friend in trouble and turn up at their place and it seems empty, but the front door’s unlocked, it’s not a good sign, is it?

Pushing the door open, I peered inside. The hall was in near darkness, with just the twilight coming in from two large windows on the landing to illuminate it. A huge staircase led up the landing, its bannisters ending in bronze lion’s heads that scowled impassively at me. It was like walking onto the set of a Hammer Horror film. Despite the circumstances, I couldn’t help but smile, imagining Christopher Lee as Dracula, descending the staircase with that crazed look in his eyes. Behind me on the wall was one of those old fashioned, round light switches. It didn’t work. I looked around downstairs, my footsteps echoing loudly on the tiles. In the kitchen I found a loaf of bread, green with mould. Again, not a good sign. The place had apparently been deserted for some time.

I called out, “Billy?” The sound of my voice echoing round that empty hall was disquieting. I headed up the stairs, which creaked with every step. I called Billy’s name again when I reached the landing, trying each door I found. They were all locked except for one. There was a gallery beyond it that turned left after thirty feet. I checked a few rooms on the way – store cupboards, guest rooms, nothing unusual. So I walked on, with a growing sense of trepidation. Like I said before, I’ve never seen anything in my job that was genuinely scary, but that doesn’t mean I scare easily. I’ve had a gun shoved in my face before, so ordinarily a big, old empty house wouldn’t even register. There was something about this place, though. Something I’d never encountered before. Not a smell, or a sound, just a tangible sense of dread.

Around the corner was a flight of stairs. From somewhere up above, I heard a repeated banging. I ran upstairs. There was something worrying about the urgency of that sound. Had Billy hurt himself? Was he lying prone and bleeding, unable to communicate except by thumping the floor? Or was it a headboard banging against a wall? That thought stopped me in my tracks. It would explain why Billy hadn’t come when I called out. Okay, poor choice of words there. I was beginning to feel a bit foolish for having let this place get to me. I called out again when I reached the next floor – just in case there was something going on that I didn’t want to walk in on. I tried the nearest door, which opened into a huge bedroom.

Broken furniture, empty bottles, cigarette packets, clothes, books and ornaments were strewn all over the floor. A silhouette obscured one window. I pulled out the torch I’d brought with me and shone it at the figure. It was Billy, sitting in the dark with his legs hugged tight to his chest, rocking back and forth idiotically. He didn’t look up at me. Whatever he’d taken, he was clearly shot to bits. He looked shocking. His face was grey, and filmed with sweat that matted his hair to it. He used to have dark hair. Now it was almost white. His eyes were so dark and bloodshot, it made my heart sink. I called his name again – twice – but it wasn’t until I actually went over to him and shook him that he even noticed me. Then he looked up so suddenly that I jumped backwards, tripping over a nest of tables. Not really the entrance I wanted to make.

Billy sounded – and smelt – like he’d been drinking solidly. For days. “I shouldn’t have called you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey,” I said, picking myself up off the floor, “it’s okay. Billy, whatever’s going on here, I can help.”

Billy just stared off into the darkness behind me.

“Who else was I gonna call?”

“Ghostbusters?”

He looked up at me then, his face blank, pasty and blotched. Sweat and drool dripped from his chin, and his head swayed as if with the effort of just focussing on me. Then he smiled, his eyes suddenly alive. He laughed – so loud that I nearly pissed myself. Howling with laughter, Billy fell sideways, knocking over an empty bottle. I started laughing, too, relief flooding through me – but not my pants, thankfully. Once we’d both calmed down, Billy didn’t waste time catching up.

“It’s Liz. It’s not her anymore. Johnny, she’s – I had to bolt the doors.” He pointed behind me, to a pair of sturdy looking, panelled doors. I shone my torch at them, and saw that they were indeed bolted, and a chair was wedged under the handles. I looked back at Billy.

“Liz is in there?” At that point I was starting to think the worst – that Billy, in some drunken, drug-crazed moment of insanity had attacked Liz. As it turns out, that wasn’t the worst, not by a long way.

“I had to stick the chair there, too – to stop it getting out,” he said, nodding, as if this was anything even approaching a reasonable explanation.

“Stop what getting out?” I said. “You mean Liz, right? Billy, what the fuck is going on? What have you done to her?”

He put his hands up at that.

“Me? I didn’t… she did it, Johnny. She did it to herself.”

“Did what? What did she do, Billy?”

It was a long time before he spoke again.

“The book. She read it. Aloud.”

“The Voynich Manuscript?”

Billy nodded.

“Okay, so she read a book – aloud – that no one before her has ever been able to translate, and you locked her in there?”

Billy nodded again.

“Look, Billy. If you two have had a row – I mean, is she okay in there? What’s happened?”

Billy shook his head.

“No. No, she’s definitely not okay.”

“Well then don’t you think you should let her out?” I was getting impatient by this point, so I walked over to the doors and shouted, “Liz?”

“No!” screamed Billy, and I heard a distinctive click. Slowly, I turned to see that that from somewhere amongst the mess he’d grabbed a double-barrelled shotgun, which he was pointing right at me. “Just sit down,” he demanded. “Stay still, and I’ll explain it all, I swear.”

I did as I was told.

“Billy, look, I have to ask you this. I need you to tell me. Did you shoot Liz?”

Billy laughed at that – not out loud like before, but in wheezing sobs that brought him limply to his knees.

“It’s not for her,” he said, “it’s for me.”

Billy swiped up a bottle of gin, and cracked it open. He took a swig, then offered it to me.

“We can’t let that – thing get out, Johnny – not now. It’s funny, you know? She was so excited to finally do it, to find the key. From then on, she never stopped working on it, like all day and all night. I’d hardly see her, she was locked in there with that book all the time! And now…”

He started laughing again, on the verge of weeping. He wiped his eyes with back of his hand, and took the bottle off me.

“I don’t know what else to do. Should’ve stopped her. I didn’t know, though. Stupid!”

He banged the barrel of the shotgun against his head in an agony of frustration.

“Billy – why don’t you put the gun down now, yes? It’s okay, I’m not going to try anything.”

Slowly, he put the shotgun down next to him.

“She wanted to be the first. You know? It’s almost like – like she wanted it to happen.”

“What? What did she do, Billy? What happened after she read the book?”

“I don’t know, not really. But she was gone.”

“Gone? Where?”

Billy took another swig of gin before answering.

“I was asleep when she read it the first time. When she woke me up, I was still pissed out of my skull, so I didn’t really understand her, but she was saying how this chant thing had worked, and it was all true.”

“What was all true?” I asked, reaching into the pocket of my jacket without thinking. Billy had his hand on the shotgun in an instant. I held mine up.

“Woah – woah, it’s okay. I’m just getting my cigarettes. That’s if it’s okay to smoke in here?” I flashed him a grin, looking at the mess spread around us.

“You’ve got fags?”

I nodded, pulling one out for myself, then tossing him the packet.

“So what was she talking about?”

“It’s a guide book. Sort of,” he said, taking a grateful drag on his cigarette. “Not exactly ‘Lonely Planet’ material, though,” he said with a brief smile.

“Erm, okay. Are you going to make sense at any point, or is this where you start talking about babel fish?”

“Look, I didn’t get all the details, right? She was talking about all kinds of different stuff at once, in, like, all different languages. You know she’s really into that – dead languages and stuff?”

I nodded. “I looked her up.”

“You know she works for you lot, then? For the government?”

This I did not know.

“I reckon that’s how come she found the key. I mean, it’s in her journal. She wouldn’t say how she found it – never told me what her job was, either. I remember what she said about the book, though. It shows you how to cross over – that’s what she said.”

“Cross over? What do you mean?”

“To another world,” Billy replied, flatly. I couldn’t help but let out a derisive snort at that. “Okay, now you’re just talking bollocks.”

“It opens a portal – she showed me!”

“And that’s where Liz went?” I thought it best to humour him, seeing as he appeared to be stark raving mad, and had a shotgun next to him.

“She wasn’t there long the first time, and like I said, I was asleep. So she did it again to show me. We went into the other room, and she read out this, like, mumbo-jumbo. There was this noise, like thunder, but backwards. And then there was this purple light – blinding – like a star. I was hung over, so I couldn’t look. Then it all went quiet, and when I opened my eyes, the light was gone. So was Liz.”

“What did you do?”

“I waited. Nothing else to do. I was gonna try reading out the chant, or whatever it is. Couldn’t, though. I was too fucking scared, Johnny. I couldn’t help her…” His voice had dropped to a whisper, and with those last words, he began to sob in phlegmy gasps.

“So then what happened?”

Billy looked at me through his tears as if the answer was obvious, which I suppose it was.

“She came back. Only…” his voice trailed off as he watched the smoke curling up from his cigarette. He frowned, lips quivering. “It wasn’t her. I mean it was her body, but inside, behind those eyes, it was something else. Something…terrible. Just wearing her like a fucking glove puppet!”

“So you locked her in there? Fair enough. So how do you know she’s even still in there?”

“It bangs on the doors every now and then.”

“Was that what I heard on the way up?” I asked.

He nodded weakly. “At least it’s stopped shouting. That voice – it was making me sick. Like it didn’t know how to make her speak properly.”

Despite the sincerity of Billy’s words, I was sceptical. Can you blame me? Although he believed that’s what had happened, I still couldn’t rule out the possibility that this was all some hallucination of his.

“Billy, if you won’t let me see her, then at least let me talk to her, just so I can find out what she – what it – wants.”

Billy just glugged down more gin. “I know what it wants,” he said bitterly. He wouldn’t say any more on the subject, though.

“Okay, well where’s Liz’s journal?”

He looked around, then reached behind him, and picked up a notebook bound in red leather, which he handed to me. When I took it, I had a sudden flashback from my dream of that windswept landscape against a purple sky. I shuddered involuntarily. I suppose Billy’s talk of portals to other worlds was getting to me. I opened the notebook at random. Liz’s handwriting was a flowing, cursive script, neatly arranged on each page in perfectly straight lines, with all kinds of obscure notations and diagrams. I recognised a few Cabalistic symbols like the Tree of Life, as well as a few images copied from the Voynich Manuscript itself. There were references to Dee’s work, as well as Bacon’s and other philosophers, occultists and cryptographers. In particular, she made references to Frank Newbold, probably the most famous cryptographer to work on the manuscript. Newbold theorized that the last page of the manuscript contained the Latin phrase, ‘Michi dabas multas portas,’ which he translated as, ‘To me thou gavest many gates’. He used the Latin as the basis for a key to decipher the text. I got a bit lost at this point, but as far as I can gather, Newbold was looking at this from a Cabalistic perspective, in that he took ‘gates’ to mean paired combinations of letters, each combination having a particular value. Liz, however, implied in her notes that there was also a more literal meaning. These ‘gates’, according to her, are portals – doorways to other worlds that can somehow be activated, apparently just by speaking aloud the correct combinations of letters. By now I was totally mystified. The way that she described it all made it sound so simple, but also totally bonkers.

Billy’s gentle snoring distracted me. I looked up to see that he was slumped with his head on his chest, legs akimbo, and slowly sagging forward with each gurgling breath. He’d helped himself to another cigarette while I was reading, and this had burned down to the filter. I thought about phoning the police then – though I was reluctant to do that if I could sort this mess out on my own. Instead, I reached forward slowly and carefully, then grabbed the shotgun. Thankfully, Billy just kept on snoring. With the shotgun placed safely out of his reach, I returned to the notebook. It got more absurd and perplexing the more I read. She alluded to John Dee’s notorious conversations with angels, which she had interpreted as aliens. She’d even gone so far as to say that the ‘shewstone’ that Dee used to contact these aliens, was invented by Roger Bacon. I knew that he’s credited with having invented the magnifying glass, but Liz had wondered far into the realms of fantasy by now. I half expected her to be quoting Gandalf next. Instead, as if this wasn’t weird enough, she’d linked the horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft into all of this. Lovecraft reputedly got his inspiration for the infamous ‘Necronomicon’ from the Voynich Manuscript. I’m quite a fan of his stories, so I’d heard about this already. Liz, though, couldn’t leave it at that. According to her, Lovecraft first heard about the Necronomicon from his wife, Sonia Greene, who was Aleister Crowley’s ex-girlfriend. Crowley, apparently, owned a copy of the Necronomicon, which had once belonged to John Dee. So Liz was implying now that even this book is real. I couldn’t take much more, so I flicked to the last few pages.

Billy was still snoring, and I didn’t want to wake him since he looked like he hadn’t slept for days. Otherwise I would have asked him to point out where Liz’s actual translation was amidst all this nonsense. So far I’d found nothing. Then, I found something entitled the ‘Wyrd Cant’, which Liz had attributed to Dee. It was gibberish – about thirty lines of it. Phonetically, it was complex, and seemingly unpronounceable. Presumably, this was one of the ‘gates’ that Liz had referred to. On the opposite page, were Liz’s own words:

Forgive me, Billy. I have done something terrible. No, I can’t ask for forgiveness, not

now. I fully expect you to hate me for what I have done, and it is nothing less than I

deserve. It is only now, as my memory of events returns to me, that I realise how foolish

I have been. I find myself struggling – fighting, now – to maintain my own volition, to

remain myself. When I first returned from beyond the gate, I had only vague

impressions of that other place. Had I known what awaited me on the other side, I

would never have taken that journey. I remember the sky – it was a livid purple, shot through with whorls of dark, swirling clouds. The air was thin, rarefied, and had a

strange, chemical tang to it. The ground beneath my feet was a dusty grey. Arranged

around me in a circle roughly fifty metres across were huge, curving metallic spires like

the claws of some great beast, and beyond that I saw a filmy surface of some sort of

dome, that sparked and crackled with some exotic energy as dust was thrown up against

it by the winds outside.

At this point I had to stop reading. This was the scene I saw in my dream. I felt as if I was suddenly infected with the same madness that had clearly overtaken Liz and Billy. How could this be real? I wondered if perhaps this whole thing was a dream, or some kind of psychotic episode, and right now I was, in fact, languishing in some psychiatric institution, drooling and giggling to myself. No, I told myself – get a grip. I carried on reading:

At the base of each spire was an aperture, so I headed toward the one directly ahead

of me. The substance of the spires was smooth and cold against my fingers. Inside the

aperture was a spiralling ramp, leading underground, which I followed. After what felt

like roughly then metres, this opened out into a large egg-shaped chamber of the same

cold, smooth metal, lit by some unseen source. There were several large, circular tubs,

with strangely organic looking pipes extending from them and snaking across the floor.

Each tub was topped by a transparent dome, inside which were a variety of plants –

some of which looked familiar, others less so. There were doorways at regular intervals

around the room, so I made for the one opposite me, hoping to work my way to the heart

of this strange building.

The next chamber was of a similar size and shape, but housed large cylinders

containing what appeared to be biological specimens – few of which I have ever seen before. I could not tell if these creatures were alive or dead, until, moving through the

macabre collection, I saw something familiar. It was a woman, curled up in a foetal

position inside her container, as if she were simply sleeping. As I watched, her

chest did not expand as it would were she breathing. Her skin had a healthy olive colouration, though – not the pallor of a corpse. I rapped my knuckles against the

cylinder, but she did not move or respond in any way. Troubled by this discovery, I hesitated, fearful for my safety and my sanity. I continued, though, reassuring myself

that it was a short dash to the surface should I find myself in danger.

Then I came to a chamber filled with bizarre machinery of a bio-

mechanical aspect, all ornately wrought, as if they were the guts of Victorian automata. Pipes, tubes, valves, manifolds and other obscure apparatus were suspended from the ceiling. Beneath them were several interconnected, circular pools of a viscous, greenish liquid. I barely had time to take in my surroundings, however, before I became aware

of a sudden pressure upon me, as if gravity had drastically increased around me. My

limbs felt heavy, and I found it a struggle to lift my head. What I saw when I did so

sent a thrill of panic through my nerves. One of the machines, having the appearance of

a grapple, was descending toward me. Helpless to resist, I felt cold metal close around

me, and a tube tipped with something resembling a hypodermic needle snaked down.

I found I could not even scream as it punctured my neck. Moments later, my

consciousness failed me.

My next memory was of waking in the study adjoining my bedroom. I was

naked and shivering, my throat horribly parched and sore. I had no recollection of how

I had got there, and immediately assumed that my disorientation must be due to having

taken a large amount of ketamine the night before. I rose shakily, and headed into the

bedroom to find you sprawled on the bed, asleep. As I climbed under the covers next

to you, I felt something stir within my mind. Something foreign, alien and sinister.

Though I tried to relax, to dismiss the sensation as the last vestiges of some drug

fugue, I found myself unable to quash the disturbing thoughts and sense impressions

that lurked at the edges of my awareness. So I picked up my notebook to write all

this down. My hope is that this will go some way to explaining my actions, though

I know now that they have caused me to forfeit not just my life, but your love. I will

fight for as long as I can.

Reading Liz’s account, I felt that dread coming over me again, pernicious and unrelenting. Normally, I’m not really one for overblown prose – I leave that to writers like Lovecraft – but at this point I felt so totally freaked out by what I was reading that I can’t think how else to describe it. I had to put the notebook down again and light a cigarette – my hands shaking as I did so. I tried not to think about my dream, and about the illustrations on the pages of the Voynich Manuscript, and how they related to what Liz had just described. Of course, I couldn’t stop myself, though. And I knew that this still could all be just some madness of hers, and the scenes of my dream just a coincidence, but that dread had taken hold of me. I suppose it served me right, really. All these years I’d been wanting some mystery, some magic, a hint at the otherworldly. I’d craved it like a drug, like it was some god-given calling. And I’d always been disappointed. Well, now it seemed I had one, and it scared the shit out of me. I reached for the gin bottle at Billy’s side and slugged it back greedily until my heart stopped hammering and my hands were steady again. So. What should I do? In the absence of any other ideas, I carried on reading. That was why I’d come here, to discover the truth.

I skimmed over the next page, forcing myself not to get drawn in, keeping in mind that I was looking purely for evidence that Liz had, as Billy claimed, translated the manuscript. I couldn’t find anything definite – just allusions. I noticed though, that Liz’s handwriting was becoming less controlled, shaky and smudged. There were spelling mistakes, and sentences that trailed off into nonsense or scribbles. Her final entry began with a quote from one of Dee’s angel conversations:

The Earth laboreth as sick, yea sick into death.

The Waters pour forth weepings, and have not moisture sufficient to

quench their own sorrows.

The Aire withereth, for her heat is infected.

The Fire consumeth and is scalded with his own heat.

The Bodies above are ready to say, We are weary of our courses.

Nature would fain creep again into the bosom of her good and gracious Master.

Darknesse is now heavy and sinketh down together: she hath builded herself,

yea, I say, she hath advanced her self into a mighty building, she saith,

Have done, for I am ready to receive my burden.

Hell itself is weary of Earth: For why? The son of Darknesse cometh now to challenge his right: and seeing all things prepared and provided, desireth to

establish himself a kingdom; saying, “We are not stronge enough, Let us now

build a kingdom upon earth, and Now establish that which we could not confirm above.”

And therefore, behold the end.

Liz’s last few words were a desperate scrawl, gouged into the page rather than written:

I can feel it. I do not have much time. This other life we made, that grows inside me –

what will it become? Remember me as I was before this, Billy, when I was still myself,

and could still tell you that I love you. My mind is besieged, the enemy at the gates, and

I am sinking down.

I am Darknesse, and I am ready to receive my burden.

And that was it. Nothing more. I stared at that page for a long time, chewing my bottom lip as I contemplated those last words. ‘I am Darknesse’. At the time I had no idea what it was supposed to mean. I wish that was still the case. Eventually I put the notebook down and lit another cigarette, sitting there in the gloom while Billy drifted ever deeper into sleep. It seemed that there was only one thing more to do, so when I’d finished my smoke, I stood up, rubbing some life back into my cramped legs, and paced over to the double doors. When I pulled the chair away, it’s feet scraped noisily on the wood-panelled floor, but a quick glance in Billy’s direction was enough to satisfy me that he was still asleep. I put the chair to one side, then reached up to unbolt the doors. It took an effort of will to steady my fingers around the big, wrought iron key, and every snick of the lock as I turned it made my thumping heart skip a beat. With shaking hands I took hold of the door handles, my guts squirming as that dread clutched at them. I took a deep breath to calm myself, which didn’t really work, so with a whispered, “Fuck it”, I swung the doors open. And yes, they creaked ominously.

The study was dark, so I flicked on my torch and tried my best to stop the beam from flickering crazily as my hands shook.

“Hello?” I said into the darkness. The room was empty. Besides a desk, a chair, a bookshelf, a few pictures and some ornaments, there was nothing. No portal to the Otherworlds, no alien vistas. And no Liz.

“It’ll be back. It will, when it wants to.”

I turned to see Billy looking at me. Stupidly, I’d left the shotgun on the floor. He shot me. The force of the impact threw me into the darkness. At that range he could have blown my head off, but whether because of our friendship of more than twenty years, or just because he was a mess, Billy shot me in my left arm. Now, though, I wish to Christ that he had shot me in the head. Not that it didn’t hurt being shot. I blacked out. Not very Fox Mulder, is it?

When I came to, I discovered that I was handcuffed by my left wrist to a radiator under the window. The handcuffs were adorned with fluffy, pink feathers. To Billy’s credit, he’d tied a makeshift tourniquet round my left arm, which had gone completely numb.

“Nice handcuffs,” I croaked. “Classy.” My throat was parched, and I felt nauseous, which was hardly surprising. Billy was pacing around the room, the shotgun resting in the crook of his arm, the bottle of gin in his other hand.

“I’m sorry, Johnny. Really, mate, I am. But this things has to be stopped. If it gets out of here…” He left the sentence hanging, and handed me the bottle instead. I took a slug of it, which helped to quell the nausea a little.

“So, what now?” I asked, noticing that he had left the doors to the study wide open.

“Now”, said Billy, crouching down to help himself to another cigarette, “we wait. I sorta figured it must be coming and going. Sometimes I’d hear it chanting, and then there’d be a light, and then it’d all go quiet. Guess it’s got stuff to do.”

He settled down cross-legged opposite me, and passed me the cigarette he’d just lit, taking another from the packet for himself.

“So you’re going to shoot her, too?” My voice was thick from the smoke.

“What fucking choice do I have? All this time, I’ve been sat here, scared out of my mind. I should have killed it as soon as I knew it wasn’t Liz. I can do it now, though. I’m not a coward, Johnny. That body it’s walking round in – the lips I kissed and told me she loves me, that womb that’s carrying our child. Ain’t her anymore.”

“Jesus Christ – Liz is pregnant?” I remembered the last entry in her notebook then.

“Not anymore. It’s just meat. Like I said, she’s gone.” When the end finally comes for me, the look on Billy’s face right then will be the last thing I see, I’m sure. In his mind, he had nothing left to live for, and it showed in his eyes. Right then, though, I didn’t understand.

“Billy, you can’t kill her – not if she’s pregnant.”

“It’s gone!” he shrieked, spraying spittle like venom. “It was our child. Now it’s gone, too.”

“What?”

“That thing, inside her – behind the eyes, they put it in her. That’s what they want. I finally worked it out. It’s how they breed, Johnny. They want to spread, take over. You get it now? It’s up to me to stop this fucking thing right here! I see that now.”

Typical. Not only had Billy got to have more success, fame and sex in his life than me, but now he was stealing my thunder – my thing. And I was the one handcuffed to a radiator with my head pounding and my left arm completely numb, not understanding what the hell was going on. Then events took a turn that rapidly brought me up to speed.

There was a noise – soft at first – like leaves rustling. It rapidly grew to a whistling, then a shriek. I could see a purplish light flickering on the walls of the study. Billy stood, shotgun levelled. The shrieking grew to a terrific, breath-taking roar of rushing air that tore at my hair and dragged rubbish on the floor toward the now brilliant purple luminescence. Billy was struggling to stay upright. Then, suddenly, it stopped. And there was that feeling again, that stifling dread.

I couldn’t see what Billy could, but I saw his features contorted into a scowl of fear and hatred. I won’t forget that look, either.

“Back! Stay back!” he spat into the darkness of the study.

I started giggling. I couldn’t help it. It must have been all the endorphins pumping through me, but when I heard Billy say that, I just felt for all the world like I was in some budget horror film. Then I saw what Billy was seeing. It was Liz – or what remained of her. By the light of that hellish, purple glow, I could see that there was something wrong with her. Her naked body was a pale grey, and there were ugly, blotchy bruises on her arms and legs, where she’d been forcibly restrained. A thick, red scar ran from her belly button to her groin. She moved like she was sleepwalking, swaying as she stepped forward. She turned her head in my direction. Her eyes were dead. There’s no other way to describe it. Whatever spark of animation, of humanity that exists within all of us, it was gone. Then she spoke to me.

“You,” she said, in a voice as empty as an open grave, “you, are the one we have been waiting for. You will join with us.”

“You stay away from him!” Billy shouted, jabbing the shotgun at her.

The thing that was Liz swivelled its head in his direction. A sardonic smile twisted its mouth, then it turned away from him, stepping toward me. Billy shot it in the head. That’s another image that will stay with me, though I wish I could forget it. The right side of its head exploded, the force of the impact punching it sideways into the wall. It collapsed against it, those lifeless eyes staring right at me. Then it pulled itself upright, spilling gore from its ruined skull as it got to its feet. It turned to Billy, giving me a view right into its head. I retched, but somehow managed not to puke over myself.

“Look what we have made.” It gestured to the study. Stepping unsteadily from the purple glow was a naked child – a boy who looked to be about five years old. Its skin was as pale as the Liz-thing’s, its eyes just as empty. It stopped in front of Billy, who dropped to his knees, whimpering.

“What have you done?” Billy cried.

The boy-thing stared at him, its face expressionless. Then as Billy knelt before it, shaking and sobbing, it placed its hand on his head.

“You will understand,” it said, its young voice utterly alien. Billy gasped, his mouth and eyes wide in terror. Then the child removed its hand, and Billy sagged, slack-jawed and twitching.

“Billy? Billy!” I shouted, but he didn’t reply, or even look at me.

The Liz-thing watched as his spasms subsided, then knelt beside him. For a moment I thought that perhaps there was some spark of humanity left in there, because it put its lips to his. As it worked its mouth against his, though, Billy’s flesh began to shrivel. To my astonishment and horror, the gaping wound in what was Liz’s head healed over in a matter of seconds, leaving only a bloody smear. The Liz-thing stood, letting Billy’s lifeless body crumple. It touched its fingers to the side of its head, seemingly satisfied. I’m not a religious man at all, but I offered up a prayer then for Billy’s soul, to whatever gods were watching. The Liz-thing regarded me with a curious frown, cocking its remade head like a bird watching a worm. Then it took the boy-thing’s hand, and they both stepped forward.

“You will come with us,” they said in unison.

I’m proud to say that I still had enough dignity and composure left to refuse.

“Like fuck, I will!” I shouted, and wrenched at the handcuffs, glad that I couldn’t feel the harm I was doing my wrist. In true horror film style, the Liz-thing and its offspring took their time, staggering ponderously toward me. I stood, and yanked and twisted the handcuffs with all my strength. There was a crack, and I toppled backwards, cracking my head on the floor. For a few moments all I could see was a red pulsing network of veins like a road map of London. Then when my vision cleared, I was looking up into the Liz-thing’s empty eyes.

“This is the world that awaits you,” it said, and placed its hand on my head.

I don’t remember much after that. I have vague impressions of floating toward those metallic structures, lit by that baleful purple, and of half floating, half falling down a spiralling corridor, and through chambers of biological specimens. A sensation of drowning, my world turned a bilious green. Then millions of shiny, black insect things, crawling around inside me, under my skin, behind my eyes. I remember I screamed.

The next thing I recall was running, out into the night that reeled and swam around me as I stumbled though trees, barely noticing as their branches tore at me. I don’t know how I’d escaped, but I remember shrieking, howling with laughter as I leaped and stumbled through the woods. I ran and ran, with my lungs burning, my heart about to burst and my legs pounding limply against the earth. I don’t know how long I’d been running, but eventually the darkness closed around me. I came to in a hospital bed.

There were questions to answer. I’d been put in a private room, and while I lay there, trying to remember the events that had brought me here, I had a visitor. He was in his fifties, dark hair slicked back. He had the kind of face that people normally warm to – soft, grey eyes, slight jowls forming around a mouth lined from smiling. He had the look a priest, though he was dressed in a dark, pin-striped suit. His voice matched his face: sympathetic, comforting.

“Good morning, Mister Trent. My name is Doctor Harman. How are you feeling?”

“What’s it to you?” I might have lost my memory, but I still had my wits about me, and I could tell straight away that this bloke was no doctor. Everything about him said spook. Probably M.O.D. You get to recognise the type in my line of work.

“Oh, come, now, Mister Trent. There’s no need to be suspicious. I only ask out of concern for your health.”

“Bollocks! What do you want?”

He looked down at the floor before replying, a rueful smile playing at his lips.

“Mister Trent, we both know that you paid a visit to your friend, Billy McCoy at Winterbourne House yesterday.”

“Do we? And who is ‘we’, anyway?”

“Please, Mister Trent. You left your car there. You received a phone call from Billy the night before. What was it he said that made you drive all the way down there to see him?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business. It’s a free country, after all, isn’t it?” I didn’t much feel like talking right then. Least of all about things that although I couldn’t remember, made me shudder, and knotted my stomach with an inexplicable dread when I tried to recall them.

“Mister Trent, your friend is dead. I apologise for putting it so bluntly, but since your fingerprints are all over the murder weapon, your freedom is by no means a certainty.”

I had a pretty clear idea where this was leading. Sure enough, ‘Doctor’ Harman opened his briefcase, producing a sheaf of papers.

“I’m sure that you’re familiar with this,” he said, handing me the papers. It was a copy of the Official Secrets Act, that I’d signed the very first day on my job. Although my post isn’t that sensitive, I’m required to keep my mouth shut when I’m told to. By writing all this down, I’m pretty much sticking up two fingers to the whole thing. Like I said at the start, I don’t care. At least I’ll be safer in prison anyway. I handed the papers back.

“Look,” I said, “I honestly don’t remember what happened, okay?”

Harman put the papers back in his briefcase, then took out something else.

“Indeed. Then perhaps this will remind you,” he said, placing the object on the bed. It was Liz’s notebook. I didn’t need to read it to know that it signified something awful. I lay there, open-mouthed and shaking as horrible images flashed through my mind.

“It wasn’t me,” I said, trying to keep the tremor from my voice. “It was Liz.”

“Go on,” he said, seating himself on the chair by the bed.

“She was crazy – I mean psychotic. Too much ketamine, I guess.” I pointed at the notebook. “All that stuff in there, it’s all rubbish. I mean, it’s clever, but none of it’s true. I guess she had what they call a ‘k-hole’, and shot Billy because he didn’t believe her. He was dying when I found him.”

“Indeed. Then how do you account for your own injuries?” Clearly he wasn’t buying any of this. I had to think fast.

“I don’t know – I guess I was freaked out. I found Billy bleeding to death, and he had the shotgun in his hands. I tried to take it off him, so I could help, but he was strung out and paranoid. There was a struggle, and the gun went off.” I was bullshitting freely now, and I could see that Harman knew it, but what else could I do?

“I see. So, do you have any idea as to Lady Winterbourne-Strickland’s whereabouts?”

I shook my head.

“Well, then, Mister Trent,” he said, getting up again, “it would seem that our business is concluded. For now.” He picked up the notebook, and put it back in his briefcase. “If, however, you should happen to remember anything else – no matter how trivial – I suggest that you contact me straight away.” He reached into his breast pocket and handed me his card.

“I will,” I lied.

He looked at me for a long time then, as if considering whether or not to have me shot.

“Mister Trent, I would like to offer you an opportunity. You are a competent investigator, highly regarded within the service. You could go far, should you so desire. All we require is your cooperation. I don’t think I need to remind you of the alternative. Good day, Mister Trent.”

I was discharged after a couple more days. My arm was healing nicely, and there was no lasting damage – not physically, anyway. A week later, I went to Billy’s funeral, and stood at the back, out of the way. He was a popular bloke, and the church was packed with friends, family, ex-girlfriends and fans. A drug overdose – that was the coroner’s verdict. I wasn’t about to dispute that, not in public, anyway. The police had issued a statement to the effect that they were concerned for Liz’s safety, and appealed for information as to her whereabouts. That was all. No one mentioned her at the funeral, thankfully. As I watched the coffin going into the ground, though, I knew that I wouldn’t be safe for long from that thing wearing her body, and its bastard child. I can feel them out there, haunting my dreams. I find myself wondering what the Liz-thing meant when it said that I am the one they have been waiting for. I suppose it doesn’t matter now. I don’t plan on finding out anytime soon. I’m guessing that Harman has Liz’s journal safely under lock and key. If I had my way, I’d burn the fucking thing – and the Voynich Manuscript, too. Had she really deciphered it? Or did she just get lucky by finding something in a basement filing cabinet of some nameless government department? Her notebook gave no clues. I’d seen no evidence there at all. I wonder if she’d kept another notebook. Maybe it’s hidden somewhere in Winterbourne House. Of course, that’s another thing that I’ll probably never know. Unless, of course, I take up Harman’s offer. If you ask me, this is all their fault. If John Dee’s ‘Wyrd Cant’ had been destroyed, then none of this would ever have happened. There are secrets that our governments keep from us, and with good reason. I wonder how long they can keep this a secret, though. And I wonder how long it will be before the end comes, before the darkness. I know one thing, though: It won’t be long before they come for me, to take me away, where I’ll be safe. I hope.

THE END