Written in Darkness Read online

  Then the reindeer abruptly gave way. Its head slumped, its legs buckled and a last ugly gasp issued from its lungs. I was thrown against the side of the cliff, with the beast lying across my right leg. I struggled free, clutched my rifle and saddlebags close to me, and lay there sandwiched between a carcass and the cliff-side. Luckily the fall had not shattered the paraffin lantern I had tied around the animal’s neck. It was my sole source of comfort.

  The madness of desperation drove me on. Unless I attempted the ascent I knew I would die here, for I was dangerously close to hypothermia. I gulped down the last of my vodka, felt a little glow of warmth in my guts, and began to crawl along the cliff-wall. What progress there was, was almost interminable, and each forward motion was hampered by the gusts that threatened to hurl me off the narrow path altogether.

  I must have crawled for hours, for the wick in the lantern was burning dim, when I at last reached the summit. As if on cue, the snowstorm completely abated, having, like me, exhausted itself.

  The moon, now much closer to the horizon, broke free of cloud cover and illuminated the landscape beyond.

  I was on a plateau of great immensity, an unbroken expanse of hinterland, and could see far into the distance. About a half-mile away, by my reckoning, lay a vast swathe of felt tents, the habitations of choice for the nomadic warriors of this region, and a mass of hundreds of tethered horses. Surely I had at last reached the camp of Baron Maximilian’s cavalry army?

  My speculations on this matter were suddenly terminated when two shadows disengaged themselves from the inky blackness formed by a cluster of huge rocks to my left and revealed themselves to be a pair of wild-eyed and lean Cossacks. They fell upon me silently, bludgeoning me with their rifle butts, despite my feeble protestations, until I succumbed to unconsciousness.

  *

  When I awoke, I found myself tied to a chair inside a tent, with a dull, thudding pain in my head. Standing in front of me, cocked pistol in one hand, was a tall, gaunt figure. His garb was oriental in style—a long yellow robe with voluminous sleeves—and upon his breast was fixed a medal for bravery: the Russian Cross of St George. His moustache and beard were grizzled, and his long reddish hair unwashed. Though his head was smallish, he possessed a lofty brow and from beneath it stared out a pair of piercing pale eyes. These eyes were not level, but lopsided, the left being noticeably lower than the right, but they were possessed of a supernatural intensity. As they stared into my own I felt as if they were boring through the retinas into the very depths of my brain, and rooting out there my innermost thoughts.

  “You are English,” he said. “I speak the language well.”

  How he had gleaned the fact, except by magic, I could not say.

  “Yes. I am a reporter for the London Evening News,” I replied, “and not a combatant. I came here to interview you.”

  “In this day and age all men are combatants. There are no neutrals; a man is either on the side of the Divine or on the side of godlessness. Which is your side?”

  There hung about my neck a medal of St Christopher that my fiancée had given me for luck and, by way of response, I drew it out from beneath my shirt.

  The Baron stepped forward, examined it, and a thin smile flickered across his face.

  “So!” he said, finally slipping the pistol he had kept trained on my head the whole time back into his pocket.

  The legends about his fanaticism were true, then. I am sure he would have shot me had I not worn a symbol of faith.

  “I will give you an interview in due course,” the Baron said, “but in the meantime, you will have the honour of joining my forces for our final victory over the Bolsheviks.”

  Then he turned his back to me and swept out of the tent like a gust of yellow flame.

  *

  Thus it came to pass that I was forcibly conscripted into the Baron’s army. Any thoughts I may have harboured about desertion were quickly dispelled by accounts of what happened to those who dared to flee the sacred mission upon which the Baron’s army was engaged. When caught, he had them either flayed alive or else hanged in the trees. The trail of mutilated bodies he left in his wake was a testimony to his utter ruthlessness regarding deserters. It was said that no deserter had ever escaped his retribution.

  We English will bear any horror in our habitual garb of quietist desperation!

  My days were a long round of near-starvation, terror and brutality on a scale beyond anything my imagination could have conjured up. We took what food we could find, raiding villages, or else living off the land, scavenging like beasts. There was no possibility of doing anything other than obeying the Baron’s orders if one wished to live. His regime was one of Holy War and continual prayer allied with discipline and asceticism of the highest order. Having forsworn the use of drugs and alcohol several months ago, he was now devoted to absolute control of mind and body. Anyone who flouted this regime would be stripped naked, left outside the camp in the freezing air and forced to survive for days on a diet of raw meat. The Baron’s war was directed at the internal as well as the external forces that led to godlessness.

  Our forays against the Bolshevik Army were a dazed blur of attacks and retreats punctuated with the screams of the dying, the clatter of horses’ hooves, flashing sabres and bloody red carnage. The stench was appalling—battlefields littered with mutilated corpses, their exposed entrails steaming in the cold air, the smell of blood mixed with the bile and faeces that had spilled from their guts.

  But always at the forefront of any military engagement was the gaunt form of the Baron astride his white horse, his long yellow robe open at the chest, revealing the holy talismans he wore. All wondered at their supernatural efficacy, for bullets appeared to whistle past him, even from weapons fired at close range. Death, it seemed, could not claim him, and he charged through the ranks of Red soldiers like the Archangel Michael, shouting prayers and slashing with his sabre left and right, his pale face and beard splattered with gore and his eyes aflame with inner certitude.

  “Truly,” I once heard him cry, above the roar of battle, “are we like unto the glorious dead in Paradise!”

  But if there was honour in his bravery during battle, I found nothing of it in his dealings with civilians. To the Baron, each one was a potential threat. He regarded communism as a disease that might have infected any individual he came across. His faith in his ability to supernaturally detect friends and foes meant that he had only to glance at someone before deciding they should be shot as traitors. During my time with his army I saw dozens of men, women and even children put to death at his command. When it came to the children he justified himself by saying that, if left alive, when older they might one day seek to revenge themselves against him and thus thwart his holy mission.

  *

  Finally I was granted the interview that had first caused me to seek out the Baron. After weeks of service in his army he decided I had earned the right to question him. He told me that any account would remain unpublished in any case, and that the whole thing was pointless.

  “The papers in the West are so sunk into materialism, so saturated with decadence, that a fair hearing is impossible. They will distort your copy, rewrite any favourable impression you may inadvertently make, and continue to spread their lies,” he said.

  “It is true that in the past I have taken,” he continued, “vast quantities of vodka, hasheesh and opium, but it was never sufficient to blot out the full horror of the monstrous world in which we live. They call me a mad Buddhist or else a fiendish Orthodox Christian, but the truth is that I am essentially only a humble spiritual man. It is the world, and not I, that has gone mad. I hold all my men in equal regard, whatever faith they possess, and they must be forged in a regime of steel so they become living weapons in the struggle. Against us stands a gang of murderers of all spiritual culture. In trying to turn this world into a materialistic paradise they will send mankind to hell. Their kind shows no mercy, for they are too far gone in depravity, which i
s why they must be shown no mercy in return. One cannot convince typhoid that it is mistaken in its actions. These are the rules of engagement in this, the climactic struggle: destroy or be destroyed. All religions are, at the primordial level, one, but the atheists’ alternative is the chaos of relativism, where evil becomes good. Those sinners who turn profanity into a virtue are the cancer eating away at spiritual civilisation. Crazy women with their legs open, hoping to corrupt the saints, we must get rid of all that.”

  “What of Bolshevism?” I said. “Do its adherents not believe it stands for something worthwhile, the liberation of the proletariat from the ruling classes? Even if they are misguided, surely they are not evil?”

  His eyes blazed paler than ever, like white fire.

  “It is a deceptive pose,” he replied, his voice rising in pitch, “a symptom of the disease. These godless usurpers believe they know better than the Almighty who has ordered this universe according to his eternal laws. The usurpers do not wish merely to dethrone the Almighty, but to rule in his stead, and accelerate the devolution of men into beasts.”

  “They cannot all be evil,” I said.

  “Do you think demons have not become more subtle in their arts? Why, when they possess a man in this age, outwardly he might still appear quite normal to the untrained eye. He may not even realise he has been ensnared. The only barrier to demonic possession is faith. My foes have their duty and I have mine. I tell you this: I have seen their vision of the future. Let the atheists gain control and the twentieth century will be the bloodiest ever. Lies will be proclaimed as truth, and the masses, through their swallowing of endless propaganda, will cease to think of salvation. Hundreds of millions will perish in the coming conflict, many more than have died even in the recent Great European War.”

  “Surely such barbarity could not come to pass!” I cried out.

  “You think I project my own prejudices or my own hatreds? You are wrong, desperately wrong. I act on behalf of the Divine. I am merely an instrument. I am nothing in and of myself but the expression of the Will of the Almighty. Like a prophet, I have seen the future. This is the age of Revelation.”

  “But how are your acts reconcilable with the god of love?” I replied.

  “You have read the scriptures. The first time Christ came in the name of love. Woe to those who rejected his love. But when he comes again it will be as the final judge—for this time he carries with him a sword. There will be a reckoning, and hell on earth will be unleashed upon the unrighteous. So it is written, so shall it be. In Islam, in Christianity, in Hinduism; in the final days of the spiritual empire, as it falls into ruins, the liberator will return.”

  *

  But as the weeks passed it became clear that the Baron’s campaign was doomed. His assaults against the Bolsheviks were invariably inconclusive, and the leader of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, had taken a personal interest in his destruction, sending wave after wave of soldiers to the East in an attempt to crush the Baron’s meagre forces now and forever. When master of Mongolia he had harboured wild schemes of riding in glory all the way to Moscow itself, routing the revolutionaries, reconsecrating the burnt-out churches and reinstalling the holy reign of the tsars. But now, this goal had been completely exposed as nothing more than a dream.

  When his men were captured they were tortured horribly for information. Peasants who had aided the Baron’s army were summarily shot by firing squads. The atrocities carried out surpassed even those he himself had sanctioned, and the Bolsheviks held the upper hand. The balance of terror had shifted irrevocably. His men began to desert in droves to the Reds, knowing that the final victory in Russia would inevitably be communist and not tsarist. No amount of regimentation and discipline could compete with this fact. And those that remained in his army were now turning against him, having had enough of hunger, of torture, his schemes of final glory aided by the supernatural intervention of the Divine, and his talk of regrouping his forces in fabled Shambhala. He despaired now of Mongolia and hatched a fantastic plan to head south across the Gobi Desert, and then to cross the mountains of Tibet, disappearing into the heights of the world and rejuvenating his spiritual mission by means of achieving the sacred aim of contact with the Hidden Masters of the World.

  After the Baron revealed this final, impossible scheme to his exhausted followers, they made several attempts on his life in the space of a few weeks. They were covert, cowardly affairs, shots fired off wildly before the perpetrator fled the camp. Only from the middle distance would these attacks be undertaken, for he still retained that personal aura of immense authority that made any show of defiance in his direct presence result in the crumbling of one’s own resolve. His assailants would inevitably flee once they had made their attempts on his life, and ride straight to the nearest Red Army grouping. There was nowhere else to go after such betrayal, no other possible shelter from the inevitable horrors that would follow if they were ever recaptured by the Baron.

  With two dozen others I followed him for a few weeks more. We travelled via a mixture of motor vehicles, camels and horses in a snaking convoy across the wastes. But gradually, one by one, his entourage slipped away. Some died on the trek across the Gobi Desert, some simply fled, until in the end only he and I remained, two shadows on horseback lost in the endless leagues of burning sand.

  “I abhor cities,” he said, through sand-crusted and chapped lips, “they are tombs. No man is truly alive who lives in such places, imprisoned by grey concrete and a labyrinth of hideous streets and factories. For me the vast open spaces are not where a man loses himself, but where he discovers himself. Men must test themselves against the full force of nature rather than be bloated worms infesting and feeding upon a corpse. I tell you, our souls are perfected by suffering and not by comfort. We must purge ourselves of industrial life. We should level all cities so that men can be men once more.”

  After making these remarks he remained silent, and scarcely seemed conscious of my presence during the course of our terrible journey.

  His beard and hair had become matted, his face and exposed chest red-brown with sunburn, and the array of talismans on his person glinted like mirrors in the bleak rays of the fierce daylight. I was reminded of the wild prophets in the wilderness brought to life in the stained glass windows of cathedrals, and of the anchorite sanctity found in Byzantine Icons.

  *

  I remember my final sight of him. The morning sky was a molten riot of colour as the red sun rose in the east, and I saw the Baron bathed in fantastic illumination, his outline framed by the shadows of the titanic Himalayan peaks. He turned back only once; his pale eyes standing out from the shade like twin pools of light. He spurred his white mount onwards, crossed himself in holy observance and made for the distance, entering those mystic extremes wherein no commonplace man might follow. I stood and stared for hours until the heavens clouded over and heavy snow began to fall, covering his tracks forever.

  *

  Egremont set aside the text he had just read and poured himself a dribble of wine. He had exhausted the contents of the bottle.

  The stranger was staring intensely at him, in expectation.

  “Well?” he finally said.

  But before Egremont could frame a response, a small white private ambulance screeched to a halt outside the café, its rear doors were flung open from the inside and two burly men clad in white coats leapt out from the rear. They made directly for the table at which Egremont and his companion were seated.

  The stranger was on his feet in an instant and made as if to flee, but the two men were too quick for him and managed to wrestle him into the back of the van before he could make good his escape.

  “Murderers!” he cried out during the struggle. “The demons have got me! I am to be executed!”

  As soon as the rear doors were locked and their quarry was safely confined, one of the men came over to the startled Egremont, who was now on his feet. He ran a handkerchief across his moist brow and ventured an explan
ation.

  “My apologies for the trouble you have been caused, sir,” he said, in a thick Russian accent, “and I hope I can rely on your discretion. He almost gave us the slip again. We have been driving around this district endlessly in search of him. He managed to escape while we were transporting him to the secure psychiatric institution in Chambleau.”

  “Who is he?” Egremont said.

  “An escaped lunatic, and a very dangerous one. It was fortunate that we found him before he attacked anyone else. He has been at large for several hours now.”

  Before Egremont could ask another question, the man turned on his heel, and jumped back into the van, which promptly sped away.

  The waiter had emerged from the café, drawn outside by the commotion, and he courteously adjusted Egremont’s chair after he had slumped back into it.

  “Remarkable,” the waiter said. “It seems as if you had a lucky escape, monsieur.”

  “But this makes no sense,” Egremont replied. “You see, that person I have been talking to sent me the documents here on the table, along with a note requesting that we meet today. I don’t understand this at all.”

  *

  During the following days and weeks, Egremont saw no news reports mentioning an escaped lunatic having been at large in Paris.

  He also made extensive enquiries in search of a psychiatric institution in Chambleau, but found that no such place existed. It was, however, during the course of these enquiries that he found an old and faded photograph of the Baron Maximilian. And he was startled by the uncanny resemblance between that long dead nobleman and the pale-faced man in the army greatcoat with whom he had talked outside the café in Montmartre.

  The Other Tenant

  Robert Zachary first became aware of the tenant in the next-door apartment a week after moving in. He never saw the person on the landing that connected their two flats, and did not hear anything that indicated his or her comings and goings. Rather it was the sound of the television set filtering through the thin wall after midnight and continuing until dawn that provided confirmation of occupancy.