The Lazarus Gate (31 page)

L
ily stood at the door to the garden, amidst the ivy, listening intently, though to what I know not. She was eight years old, and the happiest child I had ever known, and for her to be so still was peculiar.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Listen, John. Don’t you hear it?’

I inclined my head and listened, but all I could hear was the song of a lark, and a faint breeze whistling through the bushes.

‘This is when it always comes,’ she said. ‘The same time, every day.’

Lily had always been a fanciful girl, but clever beyond her years. I thought this must be one of her games. After all, the old walled garden was her favourite place to play—she believed that there was something magical behind that blue-painted door, as if it led to another world, full of her imaginary friends, of fairy folk and mythical creatures. Lily was nearly two years my junior, but had an infectious enthusiasm and boundless imagination.

‘There’s nothing, Lily,’ I said. ‘Come back inside; Mother is calling.’

And then it came—a peal of thunder, so close that I almost jumped out of my skin.

‘I told you!’ Lillian squealed, delighted. ‘You must have heard it that time. He’s here, he’s here!’

She jumped for joy and then reached for the door handle. I became very afraid, as if there was something terrible on the other side of the wall, and I seemed to know what it was but could not quite place it. I reached out for my sister, but I might as well have clutched at air, for my limbs were leaden and I could not move close enough to stop her—it was as though she was a sprite of yore, skipping out of my reach. In an instant she was beyond my sight, and I stared at an inexplicable pitch darkness that lay beyond the door.

The sun was at my back. My mother’s voice faded on a balmy summer breeze. The bees buzzed quietly in the honeysuckle. And yet, beyond the door was a scene of cold night, with rumbling thunder and intermittent cracks of lightning that pierced the gloom. I was afraid, and had my sister not already entered the fearful twilight realm ahead of me, I would have returned to the bosom of my family in the pretty white house behind me. Lily had always been bolder than me. Not to be outdone, I urged my legs onwards, and stepped over the threshold.

* * *

I stood on the wooden deck of an immense, four-masted ship. Water lashed over the deck as the vessel was tossed about on gigantic waves, causing sailors in sou’westers to scurry about like worker ants, desperately battening down hatches and tying off wayward rigging. Lightning flickered all around and rain hammered the beleaguered crew, whose shouts were lost on the wind.

I tried to steady myself, but I was only a boy of ten, and found the footing on the sea-slicked deck treacherous. I fell down more than once, grazing my knees, and shivered as I realised that my clothes were wet through. I looked around desperately for Lillian, but she was nowhere to be seen. I was dreadfully confused – I knew not how I had come to be on this ship, nor why. Perhaps I had stowed away, in a bid to escape my overbearing father. Or perhaps I was sailing abroad to find him. Yes, that was it! We were heading to India to find Brigadier Hardwick, only the going was heavy. But this ship, the
Helen B. Jackson
, out of the United States, was as doughty as the crew who served upon her. I forgot about my sister, as if she had never even existed.

I tried in vain to speak to the sailors around me, but they ignored me and went about their business. And then, amidst the peals of thunder, I heard another sound, a bestial roar that chilled my blood. And the sailors turned to face this new threat, and made all haste to the leeward side of the ship, to the great howitzers that lined the deck. And as the ship heeled and the lee side rose, the source of all my night terrors since the day of my birth hove into view. It was the dragon, and it arced through the air towards us, lighting the sky with orange fire. The rain that drove into the beast condensed to steam, creating clouds of vapour that coalesced around its body, before dissipating in an instant at the beat of those gigantic, leathery wings.

The dragon roared again, and I froze in terror. This thing was all evil personified, and its bellow seemed to shake me from within just as surely as it deafened me without.

The roar of the beast and the rumble of thunder were now a hellish concerto, punctuated by the thumping percussion of the howitzers. The sky was set afire by bursts of shrapnel, and the dragon wheeled and dived, as if swimming through a sea of flame.

It shrugged off the worst the seamen could throw at it, and swooped betwixt our foremost masts, spewing a gout of flame towards the fo’castle, incinerating a dozen men and turning the foremast to kindling. I felt the heat on my face, heard the screams of the men caught in the conflagration, and turned to flee the monster. Yet all I did was run into someone – a woman, dressed all in black. I looked up at her, bewildered, and recognised my sister, all grown up. Good Christ! How had I forgotten about her? She was the reason I had come to this place, and I had almost failed her. Yet she was not really Lillian at all – the more I beheld the woman, the more I sensed something… different about her. She took my hand, and spoke to me in a tone that was soothing, yet somehow dispassionate.

‘Come with me, John. Do not be afraid.’

She led me to the starboard edge of the ship. A wave pelted the bulwarks nearest us, sending a man crashing to the deck, yet it seemed to subside before us, and we walked unhindered to the deck rails as the water soused our feet. The dragon was turning back towards the ship for another pass. I was still afraid, but no longer petrified by my fear; not while Lillian held my hand. As the monster drew near, something changed in my sister. Before I knew what was happening, she had lifted me up onto the gunwale, and as the dragon drew steadily nearer, I turned to her in a panic.

‘Do not worry, brother!’ she shouted, her voice almost lost against the thunder and the monstrous roars from the raging skies. ‘This is your destiny. You must face your fears!’

‘I can’t!’ I cried. ‘I’m frightened.’

‘There is nothing to fear, John,’ she shouted back. ‘How can it kill you if you’re already dead?’

And with those words, I looked down at myself. I was a boy still, but I knew that I was really a man. My little sister was full-grown, but I was not. I put a hand to my face, and my skin was cold and lifeless.

‘A storm is coming, John,’ spoke Lillian, ‘and you must be ready for it, in this life or the next!’

Then she let go of my cold, dead hand—such a small hand, I thought—and I slipped on the waxy netting of the gunwale, and fell back towards the sea. My sister’s face grew smaller and smaller as I fell into blackness. I turned my eyes to the heavens, and saw the flames spout forth from the dragon’s maw once again, enveloping the entire ship and reducing all on board to cinders.

The inky water enfolded me like swaddling clothes, and for a moment I was content to drift slowly, peacefully to the bottom of the ocean. I closed my eyes, and took a breath, so as better to fill my lungs with saltwater and continue my journey downwards, downwards in the briny deep.

I
will never forget the moment that I awoke from that nightmare, nor the perfect vision of the woman who was there to greet me as I roused.

How many times have I heard wounded men in the service tell of the pretty nurse who sat with them when they woke from their fever? How many of them compared their nurse to an ‘angel’? I heard more such tales than I could count, and always thought them charming in their own way, but likened the men in question to overly sentimental schoolboys. How the shoe was on the other foot now!

She leaned over me, mopping my brow with a cool cloth. Her eyes were large, her complexion dark, and her sable hair fell in a loose mane about her shoulders. A more comely girl I do not think I had ever seen, and I fear that my first conscious meeting with her may have begun with a blush as she drew so close to me that I could feel her soft breath against my cheek and smell the scent of her lavender perfume. At this she smiled broadly, and I forgot all of my troubles, all questions and uncertainty; my heart fair sang.

‘Where am I?’ I asked hoarsely, my throat as dry as desert sand.

‘He speaks,’ she said with a smile. Her voice was heavily accented, possibly Balkan. ‘You’ve had a bad time, but you are safe now.’

‘Safe where?’ I persisted. My question drew a pout from her.

‘Away from harm. The country. The weather is fine, there are hills and forests for miles around, and all your worries are behind you. Drink this, and try to rest.’ She supported my head and gave me water from a ladle, and it tasted sweeter than the finest wine. I glanced about me, but my vision was blurred. I saw only a soft, diffused light, as of early morning sunlight filtering through a forest grove, and I could smell a sweet scent upon the air, like a confection of incense and rosewater.

I was about to speak again, when I realised that she had been somewhat evasive, and I had the queerest feeling that all was not well. I was ‘away from harm’, but where? Only then did I remember, in pieces at first, my memory like a shattered porcelain vase being carefully glued together. I recalled with sudden violence the dark, cold night; the flight from the House of Zhengming; the journey along the Thames. I remembered, too, the confrontation with the ghosts of my past, and the dreadful moment when my father—no, when Lazarus—had pulled the trigger and sent me plunging into the murky river. I felt the bullet strike, and flinched bodily. As I did so a tremendous pain shot through my shoulder where the wound had laid me low. The woman placed her hand softly on my chest to steady me.

‘Be rested now. There, there, my brave soldier. Be at peace.’

A figure of speech, or did she know me for a soldier? How was that possible? And why would she not tell me where I was? A dark seed of thought took root in my mind, and grew along with my panic. Was I dead? Or was I on the other side of the veil, in the nightmare world of my adversaries? Perversely, I felt that the latter was the worse scenario of the two, for I held in my mind’s eye a concoction of what the other side might be like—a hell on earth, full of suffering and fire, where every dark corner held an enemy waiting to strike. I struggled against the woman as these thoughts entered my head, but her hand, pressed gently as it was against me, was like a leaden weight. She must be strong, I thought, and then realised that it was I who was weak as a kitten.

‘Please,’ I petitioned the woman, ‘I must know where I am. How long have I been here? Who are you?’ She looked at me, resignedly.

‘So many questions,’ she sighed. ‘I will answer you, but you must promise to rest after.’ Only when I nodded agreement did she take her hand away. ‘I am Rosanna, and I have been nursing you since you came to us. My friends found you half-dead in London, and pulled you from the river. Someone has hurt you, and we thought you were dead. You were very sick for a time, but you are getting better now.’

‘How long was I sick for?’ I asked, somewhat relieved that I was not in the afterlife.

‘You have been here for almost a week now, delirious and with a fever. You look better today, but you still need rest.’

‘A week… and where exactly is “here”?’ I asked, still uncertain as to which of James’ multiverses I was in.

‘The countryside; away from London, away from harm,’ she said. She placed a finger to my lips before I could speak further. ‘Please, my brave Captain, rest. You are safe with us—we are Romani, and whoever is seeking to do you harm will not find you here. Even we do not know where we are half the time.’

‘Captain?’ I asked. ‘So you know me. How?’

She sighed theatrically, and picked a tattered card from a side-table. My card, albeit a begrimed one. ‘There was more than one of these on your person,’ she said. ‘I guessed they were yours—and I guessed correctly. Don’t worry, Captain John Hardwick, I did not see your name in my crystal ball.’ With that she laughed musically and smiled at me, which made all of my fears and questions ebb away. She was older than I had first thought—I reckoned she was in her middle twenties at least—and her voice held some quality that made her quite impossible to contradict.

‘We found a few things in your pockets. Your cards, a few coins. There were scraps of paper, letters perhaps, but they were ruined by the river-water. The men who found you took you to an apothecary to remove the bullet—they were not sure if you would want to be taken to a hospital, in case you had… run afoul of the law.’

I doubted that these gypsies would understand the full significance of the information on my calling card, but I was still somewhat nervous that my identity was known. I had no idea if I could trust these people, or if they were who they said they were. I had only the word of this pretty gypsy girl, and even though for all I knew the agents in black could have been descending on that place at that very moment, I somehow trusted her. I glanced around once more, my vision becoming clearer. I was in a tent of some sort—the soft light that I had observed earlier was diffused by the pale canvas walls. For the first time, I noticed the sounds of men talking outside, of wood being chopped, of birdsong. A fire crackled somewhere near the tent. Everything seemed so pastoral and serene, I was quite overcome. I remembered suddenly the things that had befallen me, visions of torture and betrayal flooding violently into my mind. With a start I put a hand to my left eye, and was wracked with self-pity when I felt an eye-patch. For a fleeting second I had hoped that some of my memories had been just nightmares induced by fever, but I knew then that no nightmare could match the horror that I had lived through at the hands of the Artist.