The Revenants by Geoffrey Farrington

Author:Geoffrey Farrington
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781909232174
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Published: 2013-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

We walked for some time without speaking, down by the river. At last Helena said:

“There is nothing for us there. With them. Only hatred. Only pain. We are death to them. And they cannot endure the knowledge of us.”

She stared hard at me and her voice trembled slightly, as if from some dreadful secret memory.

I said nothing. A dark cloud of fear had been released that night from some corner of my mind, and consciously I refused to stifle it. It might have been possible to do so, and that in itself was the most frightening thing of all.

“These are hard lessons.” Helena said, “but they must be learnt for they cannot be taught.”

But I shut her voice out, drawing back into myself. At last the veneer of fantasy I had always imposed upon my life was beginning to crumble. All along I had been the captive of my own hopeless naivety. It had been too easy for me to see my new existence as something magical: a wondrous thing never to be questioned. Helena, beautiful and wise; Helena, the faery princess. She had made it easy. Her enchantment was always there to dispel all doubts and fears. Now I rejected it. Or at least I began to question it. Behind the glittering facade of endless life and immortal beauty rose the grim dark shadows of bestiality and horror. They seethed in my brain to show me the nightmare realities of hypocrisy and delusion.

I glanced around at Helena, seeing now the real depths of her fear. And there came the crushing sense that all her strength and nobility were false and doomed to failure. That truly they were nothing more than stubbornness and conceit, ultimately pathetic and inadequate for the life which was ours. She spoke of learning. What was there to learn? Only to see ourselves as we truly were. And that was enough to leave us desolate for eternity. No. Such knowledge could not be borne. The only escape was in self-deception. The world of fantasy from which I was only now emerging. The fantasy by which Maximillian could convince himself that evil was good. And worse. That evil was divine. The fantasy by which Helena told herself that we were something other than monstrous.

“How did you find me?” I asked her at last.

“Find you! Do you really suppose I could lose you? Or you me? I know your thoughts. I know your fears. But more than this. I have known your life, your death. We are one. And you are as close to me as I to you, if you would only see it. But you will not. You are distant. You are remote from me.”

“I. .. from you? I blurted out in astonishment. She paused a moment as my mind struggled to understand. Then she went on.

“You hold back. You cling to what was. You would wrap your life in a cocoon of things you know and recognise. You cannot. You cannot judge this new life through old perceptions.

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