Chapter One: The Dead Man
With thin, milk light from a shaved quarter moon at play on the map-parchment of his face, the dead man made his way among the dark topiary, overgrown and monstrous, in those abandoned ornamental gardens sprawled out among the castle ruins. Turrets fallen to a scree of brick and warped spines of collapsing battlement lay abject and senescent in the lunar sickle's cool, diluted silvering, so that even the dead man caught his breath: He had not though the place to be so changed since his demise. Black, spiteful grass thrust up between the terrace's cracked flags and from the centre of a drained and reeking fountain gazed a granite faun, horned brow streaked white by pigeon droppings and the mouth, open in song, crammed full with creeper.
Wuthering Zephyrs combed the dead man's iron grey locks and set his long tan coat to flap like sailcloth, lifting from it dusts and faded perfumes of the serengeti, up into the morbid English damp hung on the garden air. Looking into the statue's blind and bird soiled eyes it seemed to him he saw himself reflected; that same bold young pagan vision of a glorious wilderness, betrayed, like him, by age. Betrayed by time.
So lost were his dead thoughts to rue and reverie, he did not hear the huge, worm-peppered oak that was the castle's terrace door swing open at his back. Save for a dull, faint tingle in the thin machete scar that ran across his neck there at the rear, below the hairline, he received no intimation that he was observed until the woman spoke behind him in low, soft-accented tones that whirled the dead man round to face her, wild and startled.
"Lady Ragnall is expecting you. Her Ladyship will be pleased to receive you in the library. Follow me, please."
The speaker was a striking negress, some few inches taller than the dead man was himself, clad in a long skirt of what looked like emerald velvet and hung all about with bracelets, beads and gaudy fetishes, a flickering candelabra held up in one slender hand. Her hair was hidden by the turquoise wrapping of a turban, and before she turned from him to walk away down the decaying castle's silent hall he glimpsed the spiraling raised bumps of ritual disfigurements upon her cheeks, yet could not match the scarring's singular design with those of any similarly-decroated trie he had encountered while in Africa. It seemed that he had no choice but to follow where she led, down corridors that twisted like intestines, winding ever deeper into the decaying mass of this once-stately building, now a bleak and ghostly carcass.
Walking briskly so that he might match the servant woman's stride the sea man marveled at the shifting tableau of fantastic despoliation that her candle-halo brought to light about them. Here, garnet-eyed rats nested in the rubble of a great crashed chandelier that all but blocked the passage way before them both. Here, long- obliterated portraits were hung side by side among the rooting bats.
How had the opulent Ragnall estates become reduced to this? More troubling still, how could it be that his dear former friend and patron Lady Ragnall yet resided here, in chambers breached by rain; upon magnificent Axminster carpets annexed long since by the creep of moss and slug and fungus? When first he had glimpsed the moonlit relic of the castle he had known a pang of grief, believing that his wise and learned dowager companion must have passed on without issue, leaving her ancestral home and grounds to slide into the great and final disrepair of unreined nature. Grief was now replaced by an insidious and clinging apprehension as he followed the aloof and silent blackamoor between the rotting hanging tapestries beneath a frescoed ceiling that would suddenly gape open on a patch of glinting and indifferent stars.
At last the ebon beauty paused before a portal of smoke-damaged cedar that the dead man recognized as having been the entrance to the castle library, though now adorned by great and leaping dog-tongues of black soot, the remnants of some earlier catastrophe. Placing one hand upon the door's brass lion-head knob, now streaked with verdigris, the servant woman turned her cool and level stare once more upon the dead man at her heel. Limned by the yellow, stuttering radiance of the candelabra that she held aloft, her high boned face could now be seen more clearly, with the raised dots of her ritual scars uncoiling like two serpents from her cheeks and rearing up along her temples to curl inward at the shaved and hairless brownie, meeting at a point between her green and ocean-cryptic eyes. Her alien glamour and her self possession breathed upon the long spent ashes of self-possession breathed upon the long-spent ashes of the dead man's passion, nursing embers back to life amongst cold cinders he had thought long since extinguished. If perhaps he were a younger man and bore the marks of fewer wounds upon his body and his heart...? He grimaced and suppressed a rueful laugh. Perhaps if he were still alive? The bruised and luscious fruits that were her lips moved almost not at all as she pushed wide the ruined library door, and spoke her first words since she had encountered him upon the weed-cracked terrace.
"Lady Ragnall waits on you within."
Dazed by the strangeness of his circumstances, he stepped past her and into the high-roofed room beyond, where for a moment he was dazzled by what seemed a thousand scintilla of light on every side, resolving as his eyes became accustomed to the glitter into dozen upon dozens of wax candles, fabulous grotesques of spilling tallow set at random on the many mantles, shelves and surfaces contained within the library. There at the center of this glittering firmament, couched deep within the threadbare covers of a great bed made from two divans pushed one against the other was the gaunt and altered form of Lady Ragnall, quite unrecognizable save for the dancing animation in her clever eyes, sunk low within the wrinkled darkness of their sockets. Glancing up, their quick, voracious gaze settled upon the dead man. Parched lips creasing into a painted smile, at last she spoke, voice then and cracked yet somehow poignant, like a broken harpsichord.
"Dear Mr. Quatermain. How good of you to come. I've been expecting you, though all good sense informed me I should not."
Her smile here seemed to broaden, taking on a somewhat sly and knowing cast before she spoke again.
"They said that you were dead. I had a letter fro mSir Henry's brother, George, to that effect. Apparently you died at dawn three years ago in 1886, from injuries bravely received, away in some darker-than-usual corner of the darkest continent. I must say you look very well considering."
The legendary hunter and adventurer shuffled uncomfortably and seemed to duck his head within the collar of his long and trailing coat. There was the faintest shadow of a wince accompanying his reply.
"I'd had enough. Surely you know me well enough to understand that? All of the fighting. All the glories and triumphs of youth, it all became too loud for me somehow. Too rowdy and too wearying to someone of my years, but what was I do? A world enthused by 's somewhat overblown and generous accounts of my adventures would not suffer me to rest; would never tolerate the thought of Allan Quartermain, now grey and doddering, pruning the roses in some leaden suburb. No, I gave them what they wanted: a heroic death and an untended grave in some unreachably far corner of the world. Having provided my admirers with a suitable conclusion, i am free to live my afterlife, whatever span I have remaining, as my own."
Here Lady Ragnall levered herself up laboriously until she was propped up by one elbow in her nest of coverlet and pillow. Narrowing her eyes, head titled in a bird-like manner to one side she scrutinized him shrewdly.
"It was all a yarn, then? All that business that George Curtis mentioned in the letter that he sent, concerning a lost kingdom called Zu-Vendis? Why, he told me that Sir Henry Curtis was now King there and would be no more returning to these isles. He said that you were slain and so too was the Zulu friend you spoke of once. Umslopogaas, was that his name? As George reported things, your warrior companion fell heroically in battle against plotters who might otherwise have robbed Sir Henry of his life. Was this all smoke and mirrors to accompany your vanishing act, ?"
Allan sighed heacily and sat himself on the broad arm of the divan there at the foot of Lady Ragnall's makeshift bed.
"Would that it were. I saw Umslopogaas myself as he was slain, hurling his enemy Lord Nasta from a parapet before he raised his bloody axe, Inkosikaas, up to his lips and kissed it, crying out "I died, I die, but 'twas a kingly fray." No, that was real enough, as was ZuVendis and my friend Sir Henry's marriage to its Queen, Nyleptha. Only my demise was sham, a ruse to grant me freedom from my suffocating reputation."
Lady Ragnall looked away from Allan and stared thoughtfully towards the far recesses of the candle-shadowed library, where the explorer noticed that her nubian maidservant was at work building a fire within the room's sole marble hearth. With some surprise he realized that the girl was tearing pages from the folio editions ranked upon the library's many shelves to feed the fledging blaze. The dowager's chapped voice dragged his attention back to where her frail form nestled in its improvised, untidy cot.
"And yet you come back here. And why was that, I wonder?" Her ancient, knowing eyes were rested now on Quatermain once more, and as he met her gaze he understood that she already knew the answer to her question; would not be deceive by tales of him having returned out of concern for her welfare. His reply was brief and truthful.
"The taduki. I returned for the taduki.
Lady Ragnall smiled. Taduki, strangest of narcotics, to which she alone had access. With taduki, one might rend the veil of Time and be immersed in former lives, as Allan's own adventure with the Ivory boy would readily attest. With taduki, one might easily escape ones present self and circumstances.
"Ah, taduki. the drug owns us, doesn't it? Addicted to the taste of previous lives we let our current ones of hang. I let my castle fall to ruin while taduki leads me down the byways of eternity. Marisa here prepares it for me, all my other servants fled."
Here Lady Ragnall singled to the negro woman, who at once began to gather an array of curious paraphernalia from the library's far corner, setting it upon a low, carved table near the weathered armchair by the bed. Allan could see a pipe, a brazier, some powdered leaves.
The saving girl Marisa patiently lit charcoal in the brazier. Looking meaningfully into Allan's eyes, she handed him the pipe. Propped on her pillows, Lady Ragnall watched with vicarious anticipation as the great explorer held the bowl to catch the brazier's fumes, his lips pursing around the nine's elaborately decorated stem.
Marisa dropped a pinch of powdered leaves onto the brazier and as the vapor hissed up, Quatermain inhaled. The instantly familiar scent coiled tendrils deep within his skull, and even as he felt his present personality beginning to dissolve before the drug's insistent tides he knew that there was something wrong.
The library fell away and he was topping through a hideous alien abyss where cascaded foreign stars and dreadful gods howled from the Universe's rim. As gibbering blackness swallowed him, the dead man understood that this time the taduki offered not another life. This time it offered him naught but second death, much less heroic than his first, but much more final. far off, as in another world, he heard the black maidservant start to scream.
Then there was nothing save devouring light.
