All morning Daniel Langham sat on the patio, shaded from the incendiary Greek sun by the canopy of vine leaves, and wrote.
Marsha returned from the village at noon. He watched her walk up the path between the olive trees, the sight of her filling him with sadness, a pre-emptive sensation of loss he recalled from many years ago.
She walked across the patio. “I’ll be out all afternoon,” she said in her soft New England accent. “Painting.”
The roll call of her ancestors included Senegalese slaves, Hopi Indians, Inuits strayed south, and a Spanish grandmother, among others. Her skin was resplendent copper, her hair a mass of spun jet.
“By the way,” she said, almost casually, “there’s a reporter in the village, looking for you.”
His heart crashed. He found his voice. “You didn’t tell him where...?”
“I didn’t see him. Jim at the hostel told me. He was nosing around, asking questions.”
Langham nodded. Jim knew that he desired privacy in which to work. He wouldn’t say anything. The others in the village, however, might give the game away.
“From England?”
Marsha nodded. “One of your grubby Fleet Street hacks-”
“Wapping,” he said.
She shrugged, looked away. He interpreted her sudden mood as impatience at his correction, and was surprised when she looked directly at him and said: “Why, Dan? Why didn’t you tell me?”
He met her gaze. “Tell you what?”
Her long, angled face mimed exasperation. “Why all the damned lies, Dan? Why lie to me? I thought... I thought that we-” She pushed herself from the wall and ran into the villa.
He waited for several loud heartbeats. When she returned, her eyes would not meet his. She was carrying his small tin money-box.
“Marsha...”
She stared at him, anger in her emerald eyes. “We’ve been together twelve years, Dan. We shouldn’t have secrets.”
He could not bring himself to reply; nor could he bring himself to feel angry.
“I always wondered where the money came from, Dan. Your books don’t sell that well.”
“I told you, the small inheritance.”
When she looked up at him, her eyes were filmed with tears. Her fingers fumbled with the lid of the box, and Langham realised with stomach-churning dread that she had picked the lock.
She pulled the deposit book from the box with shaking fingers, held it out towards him and cried, “Five million pounds, Dan. Five fucking million pounds!” The box dropped to the terra-cotta tiles.
He stood quickly, pulled her to him and held her as she sobbed.
“Why?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He could have told her the partial truth, that he did not want to expose her to the kind of lifestyle that five million would buy, for fear that her head would be turned, that he might lose her. He could always tell her that he desired a quiet life, that he had lived a long time and now wanted an existence shorn of materialism, sham and artifice. Both were the truth, if not the whole truth.
“Where did you get it, Dan?”
“Like I said,” he whispered. “The inheritance – my father.”
“But you said he left you fifty thousand!”
“The money means nothing to me.” Which was true. “We don’t need money to be happy.”
She was almost lost for words. “But... don’t you see? It would have made things easier.” She shook her head. “You lied to me. You lied... so how can I believe anything you tell me now?”
“Marsha...” He kissed her forehead, took the deposit book from her fingers. As he did so, a faded photograph slipped from between its pages and planed to the floor.
Marsha knelt, remained kneeling as she retrieved the picture and stared at it. She stood and held out the photograph.
Four gentlemen, be-suited and bow-tied, standing on the steps of some imposing country house.
“Who are they?”
Langham took the photograph and stared at the tall, dark-haired figure on the right, who bore more than a passing resemblance to his younger self.
He indicated the figure to Marsha. “My great-grandfather,” he said, and smiled. “The money is entirely thanks to him.”
He took her in his arms again, and rocked her.
He hated himself for all the lies, but how could he possibly tell her the truth?
On the morning of the 24th of May 1899, Robert Langham boarded a train in London bound for Buckinghamshire. The summons to the Grange had arrived at his rooms the night before, in the form of a terse telegram from the Willoughby brothers: “Developments. Urgent that you make haste. Charles and Montague.”
The message was enough for him to lay aside work on his latest novel, even though he was already a month late with its delivery to his publisher.
At two that afternoon he arrived at the Grange and hurried up the steps to the imposing front door. His tug at the bell-pull was answered a minute later by Charles Willoughby. A matter of days after the events of one month ago, Willoughby had dispensed with his staff and retainers for the sake of secrecy and security.
“Langham! What took you? Hazlitt arrived at dawn! Well, come in, come in!”
Willoughby looked at once pale and excited, as if nervous exhaustion had robbed him of the ability to sleep.
He hurried after Willoughby as the doctor made his way down the corridor. “You said there’s been developments?”
“All in good time, Langham.”
Montague and Hazlitt were standing before the hearth, nursing balloon glasses and looking, Langham decided, less than sanguine. He hurried across the room and shook hands with his friends while Charles poured him a brandy.
“What’s going on? Charles hasn’t said a damned word.”
“I think,” Hazlitt said, “that you’d better hear it from the lips of the good doctor himself.” Hazlitt, although no older than Langham – thirty this year – had the physique of the brandy glass he was holding and great ginger pork-chop sideburns, which combined to give him the appearance of someone much older.
Montague nodded and took a swift mouthful of alcohol. “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he said. He was tall, like his brother, and still retained some of the athletic demeanour gained on the fields of Eton, at which school Langham had first met the three men.
“Where’s Sar-phan?” he asked on impulse.
Willoughby crossed the room and passed a glass of brandy to Langham. “Sar-phan, I regret to say, is dead.”
Langham shook his head. “Dead?”
“Two days ago, quite unexpectedly. Over the course of six hours he unaccountably weakened and passed away.” Charles Willoughby looked from Hazlitt to Langham. “There was no way we might have notified you in time.”
Langham’s pulse seemed to slow and thud in his ears. The events of the month before, their rescue of Sar-phan, all now seemed for nothing. “So that’s it,” he said, more to himself. “The end. Now we’ll never find out...”
He halted there. Hazlitt, a grin parenthesised between his sideburns, was watching him with the expression of someone privy to untold secrets.
“What is it?” Langham asked.
“Come,” Willoughby said. “Come through to the conservatory.”
Glasses in hand, the three man followed the doctor from the study and along darkened corridors. At last Charles flung open a pair of double-doors, and Langham was for a moment blinded by the bright sunlight dazzling through the glass.
The first thing he beheld, on regaining his vision, was the view across the vast lawn to the woods beyond. He could still make out the gouged track made when they had dragged the vehicle across the grass one month ago.
He looked around the conservatory, and there, stationed where they had left it – all four men exhausted with the unaccustomed effort – was the strange silver craft, the “teardrop” as Hazlitt had christened it.
On a long table beside the craft stood the assortment of odd devices and gadgets they had removed from the teardrop. Langham recalled his initial surprise, and revulsion, upon beholding the craft’s single occupant, the naked, white-skinned manikin known as Sar-phan.
“Over the course of the month,” Charles Willoughby said, “Montague and I learned to converse with Sar-phan. We taught him the rudiments of our language, and he in turn taught us one or two phrases of his. We were able to question him as to his precipitous arrival here.”
Willoughby paused, glancing from Langham to Hazlitt. “Our original speculations were a little off the mark, gentlemen. Sar-phan was not a visitor from Mars, but from the stars way beyond.”
Langham shook his head with wonderment. “The stars?”
“Over the last two weeks,” Willoughby went on, “Sar-phan told us that he was a lone explorer who hailed from a galaxy teeming with all manner of weird and wonderful life. The tales he recounted, gentlemen! The impossible wonders of life beyond the Earth!” Willoughby paused, then crossed the room and stood before the long table, his gaze fixed upon the devices arrayed there.
“Two days before he passed away, he asked us to help him return. His starcar, as he called it, was wrecked beyond repair – but all hope was not lost. The car had crossed to Earth via a portal. It was the wonder of the portal, and not the car itself, that facilitated star travel. If this device could be repaired, then it would be possible to step from this world to the next.”
Willoughby moved to a solid object at the far end of the table, shaped somewhat like half a barrel, but stepped like a plinth. He lifted it onto the floor beside the starcar, then touched a panel at its base. Immediately an array of thin silver rods seemed to grow from the plinth and form themselves into an oval frame about the size of a standing man.
Willoughby said, “We managed to put together this smaller portal from material salvaged at the crash-site. Working to Sar-phan’s instructions, Montague and I activated the portal and located his homeworld. Sadly, Sar-phan passed away before we were successful.”
Langham sat down and took a long swallow of brandy. “Is it – I mean, is it possible to...?”
Willoughby nodded. “I have activated it once since then, and I intend to do so again.” He drew himself to his full height. “Gentlemen, it is my intention not only to activate the world portal, but to step through the device and visit the world Sar-phan called Serralia.”
Montague looked at Langham. “I’ve tried to talk sense into him, alas to no avail.”
Hazlitt was shaking the ruddy nubbin of his head. “Think of the dangers, man!”
Langham said: “Consider the fate of Sar-phan, and be wary. He set foot on a world strange to him, sickened and died.”
“It is a risk I am quite prepared to take, gentlemen. Think of it. I will be the first human to leave this sorry, benighted planet. If only you had heard the wonders of the universe of which Sar-phan spoke!”
“I’m not at all sure that the wonders would counterbalance the inherent dangers,” his brother began.
“I will reconnoitre the alien world for minutes only,” Willoughby promised, “and then return.”
They left the conservatory and repaired to the dining room, and over a meal of cold salad and jugged hare they argued back and forth, Langham sometimes having to pinch himself to ascertain that he was not dreaming.
Hours later twilight descended upon the countryside around the Grange, and a full moon appeared, as if curious as to the goings on within the conservatory. Langham, Hazlitt and Montague watched, not a little inebriated by the flow of fine wines and brandy, as Willoughby climbed into a cumbersome diving suit. The suit, he claimed, would offer some measure of protection against the immediate hazards he might find on Serralia. Langham was at once solicitous as to his friend’s safety, and curious as to the outcome of the singular expedition.
Charles Willoughby shook the hand of each man in turn, then took up a box-like device from the table. This he directed at the portal and depressed some studs upon its surface. Immediately the conservatory was filled with a hair-raising crackle reminiscent of the generation of electricity, and the silver rods of the portal scintillated with a brilliant blue light. As they watched, at once frightened and fascinated, a vista appeared in the tall oval formed by the silver rods.
Langham stepped forward, staring. The scene was recognisable, and yet consisted of elements quite unlike anything he had ever seen before. He made out a vale of grass, but of blood red grass, and a distant mountain range made up of silver massifs. There were trees nearby, at least Langham gave them the name of trees: they were bent and tortured into shapes unknown to terrestrial trees, and shimmered with a rainbow iridescence.
Someone moved past Langham – Willoughby, striding awkwardly towards the portal in his diving suit.
“Think again, man!” Hazlitt warned.
Willoughby turned. “I have an opportunity to experience that which no man has ever experienced before,” he said.
He affixed a globular helmet to his suit, attached the hoses to the primitive airtanks strapped to his back, and gave one last wave.
Holding his breath, Langham watched his friend climb onto the plinth, duck through the silver oval, and step into the other world.
Hazlitt and Montague gasped and approached the portal. Langham could only stare as Dr Charles Willoughby took his first step upon alien soil.
The scene, with the suited figure of Willoughby within it, seemed now even more eerie and bizarre. It was as if its true strangeness might only be judged when compared to something familiar to their eyes.
Langham wanted nothing more than to rush forward and pull his friend back from that alien realm. Something, some fear within him at the strangeness of the world beyond the portal, rooted him to the spot. What happened seconds later made him sorely regret his inaction.
The explorer turned and stared about him. “Oh, the wonder,” Willoughby gasped in awe. “The wonder...”
Langham stepped forward. He cupped his hands as if he were hailing Willoughby over some vast distance – which, in a way, he supposed he was. “Willoughby! Don’t you think that’s enough?”
Hazlitt was beside him. “Langham’s right, old man. Time to call it a day, I say.”
At that very second, something happened to the portal. A loud static crackle filled the air.
“Charles!” Montague called out, rushing up to the portal.
A second later the silver rods of the portal glowed electric blue again, and the air was briefly charged. The scene within the frame, the alien vista with Dr Charles Willoughby in it, flickered for a few seconds, then vanished.
Langham blinked, staring through the design of rods to the far side of the conservatory.
“What happened!” Montague said.
“The infernal device malfunctioned!” Hazlitt cried. “Willoughby is stranded out there!”
The three men remained in the conservatory all night, Montague attempting to reactivate the world portal without success.
The following day Langham reluctantly returned to London. Hazlitt, a man of leisure due to a sizeable inheritance, remained at the Grange with Montague Willoughby and communicated the lack of news to Langham with cables every other day.
Over the course of the next few months, Langham worked on the novels and essays which he published under the nom de plume of E.L. Vaughan-Ellis. Every weekend he made the pilgrimage to Willoughby Grange where, along with Montague and Hazlitt, he would mount a vigil in the conservatory. As the months stretched to years with still no sign of the doctor’s return, Langham would often find himself staring into the darkened heavens, reflecting upon the singular plight of his good friend Dr Charles Willoughby, the first human being ever to venture among the stars.
“I’m going to paint. I won’t be back until late.”
She stood before him, an easel under one arm, a canvas bag in the other.
“Marsha, I want to explain.”
“You’ve had twelve years to explain, Dan.” She stared at him with mistrust. “I don’t want to hear any more lies.”
He watched her go, sick to his stomach. Later he moved into the villa, thought about fixing himself lunch. He realised that he had no appetite. He poured a stiff measure of gin and tonic with ice.
He returned to the patio and sat down. He wondered if this was really the beginning of the end, if the seed of uncertainty he had inadvertently sown in Marsha’s mind would grow between them, forcing her to leave. Worse than this was the thought that on some sequestered, subconscious level he had manufactured the rift, that he knew their time together was limited and had therefore acted to bring it to an end.
The hell of being conscious, he thought, was that we are driven by subconscious impulses over which we have little control and no real understanding.
He sipped his drink and stared down the hillside. On the sandy path down below, he made out the overweight figure of a middle-aged man struggling up through the olive groves. It was some time, perhaps three minutes, before he guessed that the man must be the journalist Marsha had mentioned. He was labouring beneath the weight of a large shoulder bag, and Langham idly wondered what it might contain.
His natural impulse was to go inside, lock the villa and feign absence. Inertia and the knowledge that the journalist would remain on the island until he had his story kept Langham where he was.
He would play the affable host, answer whatever inane questions the hack asked him, and soon it would be over.
The journalist emerged between the olive trees and paused to mop sweat from his brow. He looked up, saw Langham, and smiled. “Daniel Langham, I presume?”
“How can I help you?”
The man moved from sight beneath the villa wall, emerging a minute later at the far end of the patio. He wore a pair of beige polyester trousers and a white shirt that hammocked a considerable beer gut. His face was round and red and overweight, a blonde fringe and gold-rimmed glasses giving him the appearance of an eager sixth-form schoolboy.
With relief, he dropped his weighty shoulder bag to the ground. “Phil Turner. The Mail. Features. I hope you don’t mind... I would have called to arrange an interview, but your number isn’t listed. I’m a big fan of your novels, Mr Langham.”
He remained standing, sweating, at the end of the patio, something pathetic in his expectation.
Langham gestured to the rattan chair across the table. “I can give you an hour, before I start the afternoon shift,” he said. “You look like you could do with a drink?”
Turner laughed, waddled across the patio, and slumped into the chair. “Could murder a cold beer, if you’re twisting my arm.”
Langham moved to the kitchen and took a condensation-slick bottle of Amstel from the refrigerator, and a cooled glass.
When he returned to the patio, Turner was extricating a note-book and biro from his bag. He accepted the beer with the expression of relief.
Langham resumed his seat and sipped his gin and tonic, watching Turner as he arranged the note-book on his broad lap.
“You’ve come a long way just to interview me,” Langham said.
Turner gulped at his beer. “I was due a holiday. Thought I’d come to Ithios, combine work and play, why not? I’ve been an admirer of your work for a long time. I couldn’t resist the opportunity... Can you tell me why you choose to live here, Mr Langham?”
As interviews went, this one was relatively painless. Turner seemed genuine in his praise of the novels – at least he had read them and could discuss not only the plots, but the themes, with some degree of insight. He kept the personal questions to a minimum and superficial: was he married? Children? His book showed a mature understanding of human complexity – were any of his books autobiographical?
Langham fielded the questions, largely with platitudes, and the hour passed rapidly and not unpleasantly. He fetched Turner another beer and refreshed his own drink.
“Can I ask you who your literary influences are, Mr Langham?”
He cited Greene as an early influence, going on to say that in his opinion the writer combined an economical style with a penetrating human insight.
Turner blinked behind his glasses and dutifully took it down in painstaking short hand. He looked up, and Langham noticed that he had broken out in a fresh sweat.
“Would say that you were at all influenced by the novels of E.L. Vaughan-Ellis?” he asked, and remained staring at Langham across the table.
Despite the sudden increase of his pulse, Langham tried to maintain an outward appearance of calm. He sipped his drink, composing his thoughts. “The Victorian novelist and essayist?” he asked. “I do admire his work, yes. I’m in sympathy with certain of his views. Of course, his novels have obviously dated.”
He stopped there. Turner was leaning over his chair and delving in the shoulder bag on the floor. He pulled out three musty, mildewed volumes bound in cracked morocco, and lay them, side by side, on the table.
“I only ask because I’ve noted certain... similarities, let’s say, between your novels and those of Vaughan-Ellis.”
Langham shifted. He hoped his discomfort was not apparent to the journalist. “Is that so?”
Turner leafed through the volume entitled The Sacrifice of Fools. He came to a page marked with a torn strip of newspaper. “For instance, this passage. Let me read it out.” He raised the book and glanced across at Langham.
“‘There comes a time in life when the wise man will assess all that has gone before and adjust his circumstances accordingly; he will, if his wisdom is equal to the task, realise that his individuality is but a condition of prior experience, and attempt to discern those influences so as to be in control of his present and his future.’”
Turner paused there and stared at Langham. “Interesting, if a little overwritten.” He reached into his bag and withdrew a thick, shiny hardback. Langham saw with dismay that it was his own novel, The Treachery of Time. It, too, was marked with a strip of newspaper.
Turner opened the book and began reading: “‘Mallory realised that he had to take stock all that had gone before and adjust his circumstances accordingly. He understood that his individuality was a condition of prior experience. It was his duty to discern those influences and so control his future.’” Turner stopped reading and stared at Langham. “Don’t you agree that those two passage are remarkably similar, Mr Langham?”
Langham found his voice. “Are you accusing me of plagiarism?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. But I am interested in your explanation.”
Langham nodded. He told himself that he was in no danger from this scurrilous hack. “I read Vaughan-Ellis many years ago. I was in the habit then of keeping an extensive commonplace book – I must have noted down the passages, and then inadvertently, years later, read it and used it as my own.”
Turner nodded. “There are rather a lot of similarities between your novels and those of Vaughan-Ellis,” he commented. He tapped the three old novels before him; slips of paper bristled from the stack.
Langham gestured. “I read everything he wrote and made extensive notes.” He paused. “As a matter of interest, how did you stumble over the...” He indicated the old books.
Turner smiled. “I read his work at university,” he said. “Last year I was sent your books to review, and I couldn’t help notice the similarities. I did some research...” He stopped and lifted his beer, watching Langham all the while. “Vaughan-Ellis was the pseudonym of one Robert Langham. I wonder if there is any family connection?”
Langham sighed. “Robert Langham was my great-grandfather,” he said.
“He was? That’s a very interesting fact, Mr Langham. I wonder if you could tell me what happened to your great-grandfather?”
He wished, now, that he had sent the bastard packing. “What do you mean, happened?” Langham said.
“It is true that Robert Langham disappeared sometime around 1914?”
“I was always given to understand that he left the country for the Far East,” he said. “Nothing was ever heard of him again.”
Turner looked up from his notes. “Have you discovered exactly where your great-grandfather fetched up?”
Langham met his gaze. “No,” he said, “I haven’t. Have you?”
Turner laughed. “I haven’t,” he said. “But I’m working on it.” He closed his note-book and returned the books to his bag. “Thanks for your time, Mr Langham.” He made to leave.
“What now?” Langham asked. “Will you write up a muck-raking little piece accusing me of plagiarism?”
Turner stood and looked down at Langham for what seemed like an age. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with this story,” he said. He nodded. “But I’ll be in touch.”
Aware of his thudding heart, Langham watched the journalist step from the patio and make his slow way down the winding path towards the village.
He sipped his drink and told himself that he had no reason, no reason at all, to worry.
Turner would never discover the truth.
Robert Langham visited Montague at Willoughby Grange most weekends, often joined by Hazlitt. They would sit on armchairs and chesterfields ranged around the redundant frame of the portal device, wondering aloud at the fantastical exploits of the errant Dr Willoughby.
In the early hours of the 24th of January, 1904, Langham was awoken from a deep sleep by a familiar sound working at the edge of his consciousness. It was some minutes before he came fully to his senses. He had fallen asleep on the chesterfield in the conservatory, having spent the evening with his friends, sampling the fine wines laid down in the Willoughby’s generously stocked cellar.
At first he thought it was his drunken senses, misleading him. Many had been the night when he had dreamed about his missing friend, and numerous had been the occasions on which he thought he heard Willoughby’s voice, calling him.
This time, however, there could be no mistaking the fact. He sat up, cocked his head and listened.
He broke into a sweat as the words, muffled as if coming from a great distance, reached his ears: “Ho, there! Hazlitt, Langham, Montague – are you there, my friends? It’s me, Willoughby. For pity’s sake reply if you can hear me!”
Langham stammered: “Willoughby? Good God – where on Earth...” He caught himself with the inappropriate nature of the remark. “Where are you, Willoughby?” he called out.
“To be precise I’m on the world of Pharaxia, in the second quadrant of the Pharax-inhabited galaxy.”
Langham looked around the moon-lit chamber. The voice seemed to be issuing from one of the devices upon the table.
“One minute while I wake the others!” he cried, and seconds later he was running through the darkened corridors.
Within minutes Hazlitt and Montague were stumbling down the stairs after him, a dozen questions on their lips. “You say he’s returned, man?” Hazlitt wanted to know. “Then where the deuce is he?”
“Langham said Willoughby spoke to him,” Montague corrected his friend. “Isn’t that right?”
Langham, already before the conservatory door, turned to his night-gowned friends and cried: “I hardly know what is right! For all I know I was dreaming...”
They hurried into the chamber and Hazlitt busied himself with the gas-lamps while Langham and Montague crossed to the long table.
“Willoughby, are you still there? Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear, Langham. My word, you don’t know how good it is to hear a friendly human voice!” His own voice emanated from a blue ovoid somewhat like an emu’s egg, fashioned from some jade-like substance.
“Willoughby!” Montague cried. “Why have you left it so long before contacting us? We were at our wit’s end!”
“Is that you, Montague? Wonderful to hear you! Hazlitt, are you there too?”
Hazlitt shook his head in wonderment. “Present and correct, Willoughby. It’s been five years, man! What happened to you?”
The sound of Willoughby’s laughter issued from the blue egg. Langham noticed that, when Willoughby spoke, the egg pulsed with a subtle, effulgent light. “Where to begin! For five years I’ve lived the life of a stellar vagrant, wondering from star to star among all manner of weird and wonderful beings. The things I’ve seen, my friends! The adventures, the danger... For many years I’ve been searching the galaxy for the technology with which I might communicate with you. I even one day hope to re-open the portal, so that you might join me! Before that, however, I have a gift for you all.”
“A gift?” Langham echoed.
Willoughby laughed. “One of the devices we salvaged from Sarphan’s starcar – you have them all still, I take it?”
“Safe and sound,” Langham assured.
“Capital! Find the device shaped like an empty box, made of some silver-grey metal.”
Langham located the device on the table.
“What is it?” Hazlitt asked.
“The locals have some name for it I can hardly pronounce,” Willoughby said. “Suffice to say, it transports small objects over vast stellar distances. Langham, on the side of the box you will notice a slide-device. Push this as far back as it will go, and then wait.”
Glancing warily at his friends, Langham obeyed. The three men stood back as a low-pitched humming note sounded from the gadget.
As they watched, something appeared within the box. One second the box was empty, and the next, in a flash of light, there appeared what looked like some kind of small hand-gun. Beside it stood a vial of colourless liquid.
“Did it translate through?” Willoughby enquired.
Hazlitt stepped forward and took up the hand-gun, gingerly. “That it did!” he said. “But what is it?”
“The vial contains a serum – more than enough for the three of you. Insert the vial into the barrel of the device and depress the green stud while applying the nozzle to your carotid artery.”
“Explain yourself, man!” Hazlitt cried. “What are you asking us to do?”
“Hazlitt, calm down,” Willoughby counselled. “The vial contains a strange compound, a serum. Within the colourless liquid are a million minuscule... you might find this hard to believe, my friends, but a million machines reside within the suspension. When introduced into the bloodstream, they effect to repair the very structure of one’s body on a cellular level.”
“What on Earth are you asking us to do?” Montague cried.
“Nothing that I have not already done myself, my friends. I was awarded the treatment by a surgeon on a remote Rim world. He was appalled when he discovered that I was not amended, as they call it.”
“Yes, but what does this serum do?” Langham asked.
There was a pause. At last Willoughby said: “It repairs the body, and keeps on repairing it, so that one’s body never fails, so that one does not succumb to illness or disease...”
“Good God, man!” Hazlitt cried. “But one might very well live for ever!”
The three friends stared at each other in wonder.
Willoughby said: “Barring accidents, my friends, that is exactly what the serum will do for you. Do you wish to live for ever?”
Later, hours later, when Willoughby had talked himself hoarse answering their myriad questions and then closed the connection, promising that he would be in touch again in time, they sat in the conservatory in the quickening light of dawn and stared at the hand-gun and the vial of serum.
“Do you wish to live for ever...?” Langham whispered.
Hazlitt shook his head. “I do not... I cannot believe this,” he said.
Montague spoke up: “We have witnessed over the years many things that defy belief, and yet which we know to be the truth. Why should this be any different?”
Langham looked from Hazlitt to Montague. “Well, do we wish to live for ever?”
With a shaking hand he reached out and took up the pistol-like device and the vial of serum. He inserted the vial into the barrel of the gun and held it aloft.
“We stand on the threshold of eternity, my friends. Do you dare turn back now?”
He stayed the tremble of his hand and, as the others looked on, moved the pistol towards his neck. He located his carotid artery with his free hand, and placed the cold nozzle of the hand-gun against his flesh.
Then, closing his eyes and gasping, he depressed the green stud. A wave of iciness pass through his being, freezing his very soul, to be replaced by sudden nausea, soon gone. Within seconds he felt alert. He opened his eyes and smiled at the aghast expressions on the faces of Hazlitt and Montague. He thought of the million microscopic machines coursing through his bloodstream. He convinced himself that he could feel their beneficial effect already.
He passed the hand-gun to Montague, and after some hesitation Montague raised the gun and repeated the procedure. As Langham watched, Montague’s features took on a quick, agonised expression, and then he was smiling and passing the device to Hazlitt.
Their friend paused, unsure, eyeing the gun in his hand. For a second Langham thought that Hazlitt might refuse – and then, in a rush, he raised the gun to his thick neck and fired.
Langham raised his glass. “To the Kings of Eternity,” he said.
“To the Kings of Eternity!”
Over the course of the years that followed, the friends met every weekend to discuss the path upon which they had embarked. Once they had ascertained beyond doubt that they were no longer ageing, they debated the practical aspects of their longevity, and from time to time, in bouts of drunken reverie, considered the philosophical consequences.
From now on, theirs would be lives like no others: the future spread before them in a limitless panorama of opportunity, their fellow man condemned to firefly existences by comparison. Langham was the first to raise this issue; like the thinker he was, he foresaw the loneliness ahead, as the lives of loved ones sputtered and died like spent candles in the breeze of relentless time.
They waited for more communiqués from Willoughby, to no avail; likewise they waited for him to open the portal between the worlds.
Langham was the first to tire of his life in England. With the start of the Great War he said goodbye to his friends and sailed for Asia. Hazlitt and Montague remained as the guardians of the alien wares, and the serum gun.
Langham began a lonely, vagrant life, interrupted only when he disobeyed his head and obeyed the impulse of his heart, and allowed himself to fall in love.
From his seat on the patio Daniel Langham watched the sun set and the stars appear in the indigo heavens. Down below, the lights of the village delineated the broad curve of the bay. Marsha had not yet returned from her painting expedition, and he missed her. He wanted to apologise for all the lies down the years, explain to her who and what he was.
He considered the journalist, Turner, and what he had discovered. He told himself that he had no need for concern. Turner might have discovered his self-plagiarism, but there was no way he might deduce from it the unbelievable truth. Still, Langham chastised himself for allowing Turner this much of a lead.
In the nineteen-fifties, after many years of rootless travel around the world, and two failed relationships, he had settled in France and began writing again: pot-boiling thrillers under a pseudonym which sold reasonably well and kept him occupied. After ten years he tired of producing undemanding, low-quality work, quit writing and France and travelled again. In the mid-sixties he met Cynthia, and told himself that he knew now what it was to know love.
He had been careful to simulate the ageing process, adding hints of grey to his temples, feigning the aches and pains that he guessed must beset the body of a forty-five year-old mortal. Yet to live a lie was hard, especially when deceiving the one he loved. Cynthia had grown apart from him, intuited something at the core of his self which he was unable to share with her, and in time they had separated.
In the seventies, hurting, Langham started writing again, serious, heart-felt novels based in part on his work of seventy years ago, but drawing on his vast experience since then. He had used the name Dan Langham – Dan because he like the no-nonsense, forthright Christian name, and Langham because that was, after all, his name. He wondered now if that had been a mistake, to give Turner this link to his former self?
His thoughts were interrupted by the shrill summons of the phone. He immediately thought that it must be Marsha, calling him to join her at some village taverna. Had she forgiven him, he wondered?
He hurried into the villa and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Langham?”
“Yes, who is this –?”
“There’s been developments, Langham.”
“Good God!” He was aware that he had broken out in a drenching sweat. He sat down, or rather collapsed into the armchair.
“Hazlitt, is that you?”
“It’s been a long time, Langham. What, ten years?”
“Where are you?”
“Look down in the bay. See the jetty, the cruiser?”
Langham carried the phone to the French window and stared down the hillside. Moored alongside the jetty was a hundred foot cruiser, sleek and white in the night.
“You said there’d been-”
“Developments. Charles has contacted us again.”
“Good God...”
Hazlitt laughed. “So get yourself down here, man.”
Langham nodded. “Yes, yes, of course. I’m on my way.”
He replaced the receiver and remained staring into the night, his heart hammering with the shock.
He gathered his wits, stepped from the villa and closed the French window behind him. He was filled with a strange buoyancy, a not altogether pleasant sensation of abstraction. He left the patio and negotiated the sandy, precipitous path down the hillside through the olive groves. He had last seen Hazlitt and Montague just over ten years ago, when they had visited him on the island, and the reunion passed as if they had never parted.
Langham looked up at the bright array of burning stars spread across the zenith of the night sky. He often found himself contemplating the constellations, the wondrous fact of the life that teemed out there.
Sometimes, in moments of reverie, he would compare the life he had made for himself with Charles Willoughby’s existence among the stars. What had he achieved over the past ninety-five years, since the beginning of his immortality? He felt no satisfaction with the wealth he had amassed, the Swiss bank accounts and shares which accrued profit with little effort on his part. His books gave him far more satisfaction: certain of his output over the past twenty years filled him with pride. But, when he considered his life, it was his infrequent relationships which, when all was said and done, mattered more than anything else: his time with Cynthia all those years ago, and Caroline and Eliane before her, and now the life he shared with Marsha. He wondered if Willoughby had ever found someone with whom to share his life.
He paused at a sound behind him, a rattle of stone on the path. He turned and stared into the darkness, but could see nothing. He continued down the hillside, occasionally almost losing his footing in his haste to reach the boat.
He had almost gained the road when he heard the sound again. There was certainly someone coming down the hillside in his wake. Following him? He smiled to himself. He was being paranoid, over-cautious that his reunion with the Kings of Eternity should not be observed.
He left the olive groves and hurried along the road which skirted the bay and led, eventually, to the jetty.
Five minutes later he approached the stark, white shape of the cruiser, something ostentatious in its pristine, thrusting superstructure compared to the rude fishing boats bobbing alongside.
“Hullo down there!”
Langham looked up. The ruddy face, all pork-chop sideburns and smiles, beamed down at him. He hurried up the gangplank and halted before Hazlitt.
They embraced, pulled away to regard each other. Hazlitt had lost weight over the years, his former brandy glass physique pared down to that of an athlete. True to his old self, however, he affected an Edwardian demeanour, with tweed plus-fours, a waist-coat and fob-watch.
“Where’s Montague?” Langham asked.
“Below decks, readying the portal.”
“The portal?”
In a daze he followed Hazlitt down a short flight of steps and along a corridor. They came to a large, comfortably appointed cabin, more like the lounge of some expensive penthouse suite.
Montague Willoughby was in the middle of the room, bent over the apparatus of the world portal.
He turned as they entered and hurried across to shake Langham’s hand. Montague looked well, a bronzed nineties playboy playing the part of a sea captain with braided blazer and white slacks.
“So...” Langham began, staring from Hazlitt to Montague, “What the hell’s happening?”
Hazlitt exchanged a look with Montague. “Should I tell him, or will you?”
Montague said, “Willoughby contacted us via the blue egg just over two weeks ago. I was at the Grange. He said that he’d managed to get together the means by which to pay for the opening of the portal.”
Hazlitt crossed the cabin. Langham made out, on a table beside a porthole, the lustrous glow of the blue egg. As he watched, his friend reached out and laid a hand on the device.
Seconds later Willoughby’s voice filled the room.
“You’re all together?”
“We’re here, Willoughby,” Hazlitt said.
“Then prepare for the opening of the portal!” Willoughby declared.
As Langham watched, the oval rods glowed blue and a crackle like electricity filled the cabin.
Hazlitt turned to Langham. “We decided, when Willoughby contacted us a fortnight ago, that the time had come for us to leave Earth.”
Langham shook his head, dazed. “You’re joining Willoughby?”
Montague explained. “Life on Earth palls, Langham. We have done so much, seen so much, this century. We need new opportunities, new horizons.” He stopped there, glanced at Hazlitt.
“Are you coming with us?” Hazlitt asked.
“I... I – this is so sudden. I have my life here.”
At that moment a strange light filled the room. Langham swung towards the portal. Through the oval he beheld a scene of Edenic peace: a vast, cultivated garden of blooms so overblown and voluptuous they could only be alien.
In the foreground stood a figure Langham recognised as Willoughby, but a Willoughby greatly transformed from the man he recalled. He seemed taller than Langham remembered, his limbs attenuated, his face stretched to almost equine proportions.
He approached the interface and stared through. “My friends!” he cried. “You cannot imagine how wonderful it is to see you again! Have you decided?”
Hazlitt stepped forward, his ruddy face washed with the verdant effulgence spilling from the alien garden. “Montague and myself have made up our minds, Willoughby. We’re joining you.”
“Excellent!” Willoughby looked at Langham. “And you, my friend?”
Langham opened his mouth to speak, but found words impossible. How could he make such a decision, weigh up what he had here with what wonders might await him abroad in the galaxy?
Willoughby’s gaze moved from him, seemed to be staring beyond the three men, across the cabin to the entrance. At a sound from behind them, a short gasp, Langham turned.
The overweight figure of the journalist, Turner, stood on the threshold, staring with a mixture of fright and wonder at the glowing portal and the phantasmagorical scene it framed.
“Who the hell-?” Hazlitt began.
Montague had drawn something from his blazer and was approaching the journalist.
Langham called: “Don’t shoot him, for pity’s sake!”
Montague halted in the process of raising and aiming the pistol. “Then what the hell do you suggest we do with him?”
Turner stepped forward, his gaze drawn by the portal. He glanced at Langham, and his voice trembled. “What is this? What in Christ’s name –?”
Montague sprang at the journalist, lifted his pistol and brought it down again and again on the man’s skull. Langham could only watch, at once sickened by the degree of his friend’s violence and the effect it produced. Turner cried out and slumped to the floor, his head a bloody mess.
Montague knelt before him, felt for a pulse. He stood. “He’ll live.”
“Who is he?” Hazlitt said. “How did he-?”
“A journalist. He must have followed me.”
“Gentlemen...” It was Willoughby. The three men turned to the portal. “There is no time to lose. I can maintain the link for only so long.”
Langham stared at the unconscious journalist. “What about...?”
Willoughby stepped forward and peered into the room. “Two of you come through now, the other remove the portal to a place of safety. I will re-establish the link and you can join us.”
“But what about when he comes round?” Langham said.
“He’ll have a damned sore head and a crazed tale no one will believe,” Willoughby said.
Langham saw his opportunity. “I’ll stay behind,” he said. “I’ll take the portal to the villa.”
Montague made to step through the oval aperture of silver rods. Hazlitt turned to Langham. “We’ll see you soon, my friend.”
“What about the serum gun, the other devices?”
“They’re back at Willoughby Grange.”
“Hurry yourselves!” Willoughby called.
Montague stepped through the portal and stared about him in wonder as he reached the alien world. Hazlitt took Langham’s hand in a brief shake.
Langham watched Hazlitt step through the oval. He turned, raised his hand in a wave – and the alien garden vanished, the silver rods again flashing blue to the accompanying electric crackle.
He stared at the portal for long seconds, and then moved himself to action. He folded down the rods of the portal and lifted the plinth. It was heavy, but not unmanageable. He crossed the cabin and slipped the blue egg into the pocket of his jacket, then paused before the unconscious form of Turner.
Langham would deny everything, when the authorities came to investigate the journalist’s bizarre claims of strange devices and alien landscapes. He would even deny setting foot aboard the boat. No one had seen him arrive, and he would ensure that he left unnoticed.
He stepped from the cabin, the portal under his arm, and slipped quietly from the boat. He cut through the olive groves and made his way up the steep, winding path towards his villa.
Marsha had returned, her paint bag and half-finished canvass deposited on the table in the lounge. He concealed the portal in the spare room, locking the door behind him, then moved to the bedroom and paused on the threshold. Marsha lay curled on the bed, the sound of her even breathing filling Langham with a tumultuous emotion he found hard to contain. He wanted to wake her and end all the lies, explain to her the truth of his life.
He moved back to the lounge, poured himself a large gin and tonic and stepped onto the patio. He sat in his chair and stared out down the hillside, towards the bay and the massed stars, and considered the future.
He heard the sound of Marsha as she stirred in bed, awoke and called his name. Seconds later he heard footsteps as she padded across the lounge. She appeared in the doorway, leaned against the frame, half-asleep and languorous. “Dan? Dan, where’ve you been all this time?”
He regarded her as she watched him. He knew, then, what he must do.
He would erect the portal and wait for his friends to contact him, and then he would explain that there was no way he could join them among the stars, just yet. He had found something here too precious to sacrifice, a gift no treasure in the galaxy could replace.
He would tell Marsha what had happened all those years ago, with Charles Willoughby and the portal. Then he would tell her about the serum gun, and offer her the option of immortality.
If she accepted, then the galaxy beyond Earth would await them...
“Dan?” Marsha asked. “What is it?”
Langham felt some strange emotion constrict his throat. It was time to end the lies.
“Here,” he said, reaching out for her, “and I’ll tell you.”
Smiling uncertainly, Marsha came to him.