Inheritance of Shadows Read online

  Inheritance of Shadows

  (Lost in Time #0.7)

  by

  A. L. Lester

  For more information visit allester.co.uk

  ISBN: 9781393793274

  Copyright 2020 A.L. Lester

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Inheritance of Shadows (Lost in Time, #0.7)

  THANK YOU

  CHAPTER ONE: The Gate

  CHAPTER TWO: A Culmination of Years

  CHAPTER THREE: An Elf-Shaped Elephant

  CHAPTER FOUR: Breaking the Cypher

  CHAPTER FIVE: Rob Impresses Matty

  CHAPTER SIX: Marchant

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Cutting the Line

  CHAPTER EIGHT: An Unexpected Arrival

  CHAPTER NINE: An Ending and a Beginning

  ABOUT A.L. LESTER

  LOST IN TIME

  Cover Design: A.L. Lester

  Edited by: Lourenza Adlem

  Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

  All rights reserved.

  THANK YOU

  Inheritance of Shadows began as The Gate, a free short story that I wrote quickly, to have something to offer readers as a taste of my work and my universe before Lost in Time was published. Although it finished on a satisfying note for me—Rob and Matty found each other—I found myself wanting to know more about what happened afterwards, so I began writing monthly episodes for my newsletter subscribers. This is the result. It includes The Gate as the first chapter, because it wouldn’t make sense without it!

  Very big, squishy thank yous go to: Lourenza for her encouragement in moving me along to self-publish; J.M. Snyder, as always, for her support, this time as a publishing partner; Jude Lucens, who provided some very necessary brain-storming that resulted in me losing 3,500 words that are now available to readers of my newsletter as Rob’s War; and finally, all my newsletter subscribers, particularly those of you who took the time to let me know how much you were enjoying the serial. Plus my family, who wish their parent was more like the mother in The Railway Children “because she’s still nice to her children when she’s writing”.

  THANK YOU

  CHAPTER ONE: The Gate

  CHAPTER TWO: A Culmination of Years

  CHAPTER THREE: An Elf-Shaped Elephant

  CHAPTER FOUR: Breaking the Cypher

  CHAPTER FIVE: Rob Impresses Matty

  CHAPTER SIX: Marchant

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Cutting the Line

  CHAPTER EIGHT: An Unexpected Arrival

  CHAPTER NINE: An Ending and a Beginning

  ABOUT A.L. LESTER

  LOST IN TIME

  CHAPTER ONE: The Gate

  June 1919

  The road unfolded in front of the car as it ate up the miles in the night. Way above was the high arch of the night sky, as distant and cold and passionless as the afterlife he didn’t believe in. Arthur was dead. Finally gone. After all these weeks, dragging from hour to hour, fighting for every last breath, he’d finally let go.

  Matty didn’t know what to do with himself, so he drove. Not to anything or from anything, it was an instinctive urge to keep moving. Before long he’d have to turn the car around and go back, back to the farmhouse; back to Arthur’s cooling body, life drained and dignity finally returned. Not quite yet though.

  Six weeks ago, he’d finally come back from France to find his brother sick. There had been no warning of it in his letters. Just the usual cheerful news about the neighbours and the cousins and the titbits about the grass in the top field starting to grow, finally, now spring eventually looked like it was coming in and they were thinking about sharing a couple of pigs this year with next door and what did he think? Nothing about the illness that must have been eating him alive from the inside even then, to be so thin when he opened the door. Matty almost hadn’t recognised him. He was stooped like an old man and his skin was dry and yellow, stretched thinly over his face. Then he’d met Matty’s eyes and Matty had drawn breath and stepped forward to put his arms around him.

  “What’s wrong?” he’d asked, without even saying hello. “Is it the flu? You said you’d got over it well!” Arthur had stepped back out of his grasp, held the door wide, and didn’t answer until they were both seated at the kitchen table with a mug of strong tea.

  “Doctor Marks can’t tell me,” he’d replied, brief and to the point as always. “Says it’s a cancer, most likely, but she can’t find anything specific.” He’d poured a second cup of tea and that had been that.

  In the night Matty had heard him pacing the floor of his room, talking in a low and urgent voice. The lamplight had crept under the door as he’d paused outside, wondering. When he’d knocked and asked in a low voice if everything was all right, Arthur had stood in the half-open doorway, blocking his view into the room; although over his shoulder, Matty could see the disordered sheets and crumpled pillows that spoke of disturbed sleep and troubled dreams, plus piles of the ubiquitous books.

  Arthur had always been one for books. All through their childhood he had hoarded them like the dragons in his stories hoarded jewels, coming home triumphant from a trip to the library with yet another new volume. And later, when Father and the rector had helped him make the break from the farm and get a place at university with a scholarship, it had fed his appetite like dry twigs to a blaze. The house was full of them—Father had had quite a few of his own, even before Arthur had begun to add his share.

  Now, after Matty‘s four-year absence, there were even more. The shelves were overflowing. Small books, big books, leather-bound, and cloth-bound. Hardcovers and paper covers. Rough-edged and smooth. Wedged in on top of each other, higgledy-piggledy, balanced in stacks on every available flat surface all through the house. Arthur was writing things down too—loose leaves of paper scattered around, notes stuffed into the middle of abandoned volumes in longhand and shorthand notation.

  Matty had asked if Arthur was still writing columns­—he had made a reasonable income with articles and stories for various papers and magazines in addition to overseeing the running of the farm—and Arthur gave him half an answer, purposefully vague. The help on the farm had been down to one older man and a couple of boys in the last couple of years and it was hard to find the time. He found it difficult to concentrate since he’d become ill.

  When Matty pressed him to say when he’d first noticed his health had begun to decline, he wouldn’t say. Matty bumped into Dr Marks in the village one day and she expressed the hope that Arthur was taking care of himself. She couldn’t tell Matty very much about what ailed him; she thought it was probably a condition of the liver, but because Arthur was reluctant to let her look at him properly or be referred to a specialist, it was difficult to be certain. She was pleased Matty was home to look after him; they didn’t see much of either of them around the village these days and they were both missed.

  So Matty took himself back to the farm and tried to make things easier for Arthur. It was coming up to hay time and he worked long hours in the fields with the men to get it cut and stacked before the weather broke. He came home at twilight, itching and sore with exertion, but happy to be tired in a way that was easy to sleep off. The familiar rhythms of the farm settled into his blood again after four years of mud and bombs and gas and hurry-up-and-wait. Annie Beelock still tended the kitchen and the poultry, her son helped outside, and Gaffer Tom worked at the hedging and ditching. Jimmy and Rob both came home to their jobs as farmhands and that made it easier. Jim had his wife and family in the village, but Rob went back to sleeping in the loft over the far end of the ancient beam-and-cruck barn like he’d always done.

  It was a small farm, but the years of war had meant that they had t
o work it hard and with efficiency, as the rest of the country had been worked to feed the army in Europe and the cities on the home front. His father had had a small private income before the war that meant they’d had the luxury of schooling and a touch of life outside the small farming community they had had inherited and Arthur had his writing. It felt good to be home.

  Arthur though. Arthur was an enigma to him now. He’d always been the brother Matty looked up to. He was ten years older—almost too old to be called up in 1914 and anyway, reserved to work on the farm. He’d left for Oxford when Matty was eight and seemed even more god-like when he’d returned in the summers between classes. Matty had left school and worked with Father, content with the life of the farm and his round of friends and family. Arthur had gone to work on a London paper for a while, but then come home and helped as well as working as a writer. After Father died, they’d continued in the same vein until Matty had joined up.

  Now Arthur was changed. Not in the way so many men were changed, still able to hear the guns and smell the rancid, rotten odour of the mud. He was quieter, yes; but he was almost frenzied in his search through his books, focused on his work but unable or unwilling to tell Matty what it was he was seeking. He was thin and stooped and his yellowed skin had the texture of crepe.

  He became weaker by the day after Matty returned until two weeks ago when he’d been unable to rise from his bed. He had begun wandering in his mind, agitated and upset, sending Matty, again and again, to make sure the gates and doors were shut, and the lamps put out downstairs. He had wanted Matty to promise to burn his papers and books once he was dead. Matty had baulked at promising any such thing, despite his insistence.

  The end had come quite suddenly—Matty had been sitting in the faded red brocade chair by the bed, reading aloud in the afternoon sunlight, the familiar fall and rise of Dickens rolling from his tongue without really registering in his mind. Arthur had been lying on his side with his eyes sometimes open and sometimes shut, the cotton pillowcase stark white under his yellowed cheek. His breathing had been shallow but calm.

  “Matty?” he had said. “Matty, I need you to get rid of the books. Keep the gates shut and get rid of the books. Promise me.”

  His eyes were huge in his thin face.

  “Why, Arthur? What’s so bad about the books?”

  “I don’t want you knowing,” he’d replied. “I don’t want you to have to go through this. I can’t stop it now, I left the gate open too long, I thought I could control it. There’s a line still clinging to me and I can’t get free. Once I’m gone, they won’t have a way in. Keep the gates shut, don’t try to pull, and they won’t have a way in. Burn the books, please.”

  And he had let his eyes fall shut again, exhausted.

  Matty had taken his hand and sat and watched the sun move across the red flocked wallpaper that their mother had chosen twenty years ago, the dust motes dancing in the golden light. Arthur’s breath had become shallower and shallower as the sunlight had become thicker and darker and golden like honey dripping off the spoon. As the twilight had fallen, the shallow breathing whispered away and everything that had made Arthur himself had left.

  Matty sat and held his hand a little longer as the soft evening wrapped itself around them. Then he had straightened Arthur’s limbs and closed his eyes and tidied him under the sheet. And then he had gone downstairs and out of the front door, closing it carefully behind him. He had cranked the starter at the front of the small car he had bought a couple of weeks ago, an indulgence he’d been embarrassed to reveal to his brother, and he’d opened the yard gate, got in the car, driven through and then got out again to close it behind him—and here he was, driving on the new macadam road up over the hills, head and heart quite empty.

  THE FUNERAL WAS QUIET, solemn, nothing untoward. The rector spoke steady, kind words. Arthur was laid beside his parents in the small village churchyard, surrounded by countless generations of the same families who turned out to pay their respects. A pair of buzzards mewled close by on the thermals and Matty could hear a lark high above in the distance. The sun was warm on his shoulders as the open grave exuded the cold of the dark earth on his face. He scattered the first handful of damp soil on to the coffin and the hollow echo rang in his ears as he stood and watched the others who followed his example.

  Afterwards, Mrs Beelock put on a high tea in the formal front parlour. Plates of thickly cut ham sandwiches, boiled eggs, the dark, rich fruitcake that she turned fresh from the tin. She and her daughter, Emily, circled round with the large teapots they used for the harvest festival, pouring endless cups of strong brown tea and milk chilled from the dairy slab with the cream still thick on the top. Conversation was quiet and unstilted. These people had known both of them all their lives. Understanding words; memories of shared boyhood; a hand pressed to his arm in passing by women who had been friends with his mother. Eventually, they all left. Mrs Beelock cleared and washed up and shepherded her daughter out of the back door to feed the poultry and go on home.

  The house rang with silence. The men had gone back out to milk.

  He sighed.

  In the three days since Arthur had died, he hadn’t really thought very much. He’d gone on with the farm work, he’d taken turns sitting at the side of the light oak open coffin in the formal front parlour, a fat, sweet-smelling beeswax candle at the head and foot. He’d eaten the food that Mrs Beelock put in front of him and taken his turn at the stone sink, washing the dishes as he always had. He’d slept in his bed in the room with the green wallpaper when it was time and woken up as he always did when the sun touched the picture of the boat in the gold frame that hung on the wall at the foot of his bed.

  He’d been discharged and arrived home at the end of May. The long, hot, hard blue days of June had crept into the softer dog-days of July as he’d read volume after volume of Dickens to Arthur with slipping voice, seated in the red brocade chair with his feet on the faded rug beside the bed.

  He’d asked no questions and Arthur had provided no answers. But now, here in the shabby back sitting room, it was just him and the books.

  He poured a glass of brandy from the bottle at the back of the sideboard. The glass of the oval mirror behind was age-spotted and silvered and the heavy cut crystal of the brandy snifter was dusty. He wiped it out with the end of his black tie, uncaring. It tasted as it looked, aged and smooth, full on his tongue and hot in his throat. It brought him back to himself a little.

  He sat in Arthur’s chair, a dark, worn, comfortable leather club affair to one side of the fire, and gazed into the flames absently. He’d come home because he had never thought of going anywhere else. The farm was in his blood, as it had been in their father’s and their grandmother’s before him. He couldn’t see himself existing anywhere else in the long term, especially after his time stuck in Flanders mud. He knew Arthur had felt the same. His relief when he’d arrived home and announced he’d left London permanently had been palpable. Arthur had needed more than the farm and through his studies and his writing he had got it. The land was secondary to that.

  For Matty it was the opposite—he’d enjoyed learning at school, he enjoyed reading, discovering things. He had realised that he liked to visit new places and meet new people, so long as they weren’t trying to kill him. But for him, that came second to the land. They’d complemented each other well, fitting together like two pieces of a jigsaw, understanding each other, working around each other and carving out satisfactory lives.

  Of course, the war had changed that—it had changed things for nearly everyone. Matty wasn’t naïve enough to think that life was going to go back to exactly how it had been five years ago. The little car standing outside was one of the signs that changes were still happening. For all of that though, he hadn’t thought he would be navigating the changed world without Arthur to make him see things from a different point of view.

  He picked up the book at the top of the pile on the floor by the armchair. It was large, and l
eather-bound and heavy, with rough-cut pages and bits of paper in Arthur’s neat hand sticking out from between them as bookmarks or notes. Idly he opened it. It was well-thumbed. It fell open at one of the pages Arthur had marked.

  It was in a language he didn’t immediately recognise. Latin? Looking closer, it wasn’t Latin—he had learned at school—it was in an archaic form of English. Handwritten in thick cursive, with notation and diagrams. It looked like someone’s diary or a book of notes. Arthur had added his own, on the paper he had slipped between the pages.

  Tried salt across door and window frames and around edges of room, no good.

  Smell of burning oil.

  Push back. The energy follows thoughts.

  They can hear me thinking.

  Cut the line.

  Matty stared at the page thoughtfully and sipped some more brandy.

  THE TAP AT THE KITCHEN door took him unaware and he took the bottle of brandy out to answer it. It was Rob. Matty stepped back in silent invitation and let him in. “All right?” Rob asked, quietly.

  “Not really. Do you want a drink?” He gestured to the bottle that he’d set on the table.

  Rob looked at him with narrowed eyes and nodded. “I’ll join you.” He’d been promoted up to sergeant in the Signal Corps, Matty remembered, in a disconnected sort of way.

  “Come on through. I was in the sitting room.” Rob hesitated. The farm men never came any further into the house than the big, busy kitchen for meals. That and to use the bathroom out beside the scullery. But it was an unusual day. He followed Matty across the flagged passage and into the comfortable sitting room. In front of the sideboard, Matty slopped some more out of the bottle into another dusty glass and proffered it. Rob took it and sat where Matty gestured, on the wide, worn leather settee. Neither of them spoke. It was a comfortable kind of silence.

  He and Rob had always got on, in the way of single men. They’d gone to the pub together sometimes and taken a couple of local sisters on courting walks through the bluebell woods as a pair, a long time ago. Matty hadn’t been particularly interested in Marie Booth and he didn’t think Rob had been much interested in her sister Clemmie, either, and probably for the same reason. Matty had made sure never to look at him like that, though. He didn’t need that sort of trouble on his doorstep. Now though. He really looked at the other man, comfortably sprawled opposite him. Looking back, they’d been inseparable. They’d spent every moment they could together.