Dark Ages. John Pritchard
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Her bright and newsy letters home seemed suddenly banal. He’d looked forward to her phone-calls once, but now their Sunday chats were full of small talk. Before, he’d been so envious – watching her leave home to make her fortune. Now her student life was insignificant to him: completely overshadowed by the wonders that he’d seen. Now he was the experienced one, and she was just an innocent abroad.
He’d wanted to share it, but he couldn’t find the words. Perhaps he’d been afraid that she would laugh it off and tease him. More likely, he was scared that she’d believe. His turn to feel protective now. He couldn’t drag her into this, and cloud her sunny sky.
The shadow didn’t go away. It lingered in the comers of his heart, like winter mould. The brightest sunlight couldn’t clean it out. Gradually the fungus spread: through dank and stifled places, deep inside. Everything was different now. Things like grades and college didn’t matter any more.
Something science doesn’t understand. The laws in which he’d put his trust were teetering – about to tumble down. He had to find the real ones, and see the Universe come back together. Above all else, he had to know the truth.
But how could he explain all that to Claire?
He sat down with his cereal now; she stood up with a see-saw huffiness. As she passed, he tried to stroke her thigh. She slapped him off.
‘Fuck off, Martin. Let me be, all right?’ Biting her lip, she went back to the bedroom.
Chastened, Martin watched her go; then started on his breakfast. The cornflakes tasted sodden, like wet cardboard in his mouth.
1
Through the toughened day-room glass, the grounds looked insubstantial: receding in the mist and fading light. The afternoon was gloomy; the buzzing glare of strip-lights served to darken it still further. A thick haze had engulfed the fields and wood.
Here inside, the air seemed just as dense.
The man they knew as John was at the window – gazing out into the murk, as if entranced. There were other people in here too; but to Claire it seemed as if the man in white had brewed this up himself. He was drawing on a cigarette, detached and calm as ever; the smoke hung all about him like a wreath. The fags were second nature now: he smoked them almost absently – mechanical as an iron lung. The ash flared with the slow pulse of a lighthouse. A dozen chain-smoked butts were in the ashtray on the table, the last of them still adding to the grey haze in the room.
The air was acrid in Claire’s throat; she didn’t need to fake a cough. A couple of the others turned to look. But John kept his eyes on the ghostly world outside.
‘All right now, John …’
The ash glowed fiery orange; died again. John loosed a last grey breath of smoke, and slowly turned his head. She felt an apprehensive prickle touch her neck.
A fierce face: she’d thought so from the start. The bones of a handsome man were there; the dark eyes of a wise one. But the unkempt hair and scrubby beard gave him a wild appearance. Both hair and beard were grizzled, though he looked to be mid-thirties; his skin was tanned and toughened, deeply lined. A scowl sat best upon that face – anchored firmly in the glower of the eyes.
‘They’re ready for you now,’ Claire told him firmly. She stood aside, inviting him to come.
And John the smoker nodded, glancing down. Focusing once more on the word he’d scratched, in the paint beside the window. Spider letters, thumbnail-etched. No one else had noticed, and he knew it. But now he had it captured. He would not forget again.
More than just a word, of course; a Name. It had come again last night, still fresh, from out of desert places in his mind. The rest would surely follow in its tracks.
Murzim. The Announcer.
A faint smile twitched his mouth like a galvanized muscle: briefly alive, then lifeless as before. Straightening up, he walked towards the keeper of the door.
‘Thank you for seeing us, John,’ said Dr Lawrence.
The other’s cold eyes didn’t blink. He’d nursed his cigarette almost down to the butt: each puff drawn in, and lazily expelled. Like the slow, unconscious breathing of a thing in hibernation. But the mind behind those eyes was wide awake.
It seemed he’d never smoked before he came here. The case notes mentioned wariness, and blank incomprehension. But then he’d had a go, and grown voraciously addicted. Watching him, in search of a response, Lawrence noted again how he held his cigarette: between the second and third fingers, so that each drag masked half his face. Like somebody still learning the technique.
The other clients kept him well-supplied; gathering round to hear him speak. Something about his ramblings seemed to reach their deeper selves. Bible John, they called him; a name with sombre echoes of some half-forgotten crime.
‘We’re here to review the progress of your case,’ Lawrence went on. ‘Dr Andrews here is on my team … An affable nod from the younger man. ‘And Miss Johnston is your designated social worker.’ The woman smiled politely. ‘I wonder, could you tell us how you feel you’re progressing?’
John snorted, very faintly. ‘There is no change in the truth.’
His tone was low and surly – made more so by the European accent. Speaks English well, but not as a first language, was the comment in the file. Lawrence’s mind flashed forward through his questions, resetting them to iron out confusions.
‘What truth is that?’ he came back calmly.
‘I come from the stars – to bring Good News to the poor.’
Lawrence nodded, poker-faced; then probed again. ‘When you say from the stars … what do you mean by that?’
A fleeting smile lit John’s dark face: contemptuous, and cunning. ‘You have not heard; why should I tell?’
‘I should like to understand.’
‘Who are you, then, who asks?’
‘A doctor.’
‘A learned man. Why then have you not heard?’ John sat back, grimly satisfied with that.
Dr Andrews rubbed his jaw; eyes shrewd behind his glasses.
Lawrence was warming to the game, but didn’t let it show. ‘Do you believe that you have come from another world?’
John shook his head. ‘I go to one – which is to come.’
‘But you came here from another country? Another land?’
A pause. John’s stare had grown suspicious. ‘I have told you this before.’
‘Forgive me. Indulge me, if you would.’
John gazed at him with hooded eyes; head resting on the chairback. Then: ‘I was born in the city of Siena.’
‘In Italy?’
‘As you call it.’
Miss Johnston’s eyes flicked down towards the folder on her lap; then up again.
‘And when did you come here?’ asked Lawrence.
John stared at him; then shrugged. ‘After the Death. I do not know the year.’
‘By the Death … you mean the Black Death, is that right?’
‘The Pestilence. Indeed.’
‘That was in the fourteenth century. Do you know what century you are living in now?’
‘You