Revelation (The Water Tower Book 3) - Chris Vobe

Revelation (The Water Tower Book 3) by Chris Vobe

Book excerpt

Hilda Stanton:

“…good to look upon your face again. So many years…”

There was a television burning in an empty room. On Saturday nights, they’d gather round it, all of them; the couple and the young girl, like the family they wished they could be. The fire would be lit, of course, the room itself made comfortably warm. Occasionally, one of them – the young girl with the full face and freckles – would watch through her fingers when the monsters came; sometimes only in jest, other times because she’d actually been frightened.

“Padmasambhava…”

Whenever she hid like that, the man would run a finger along his finely-combed moustache, chuckle in that airily bemused way of his, and tell her that there was no such thing as monsters. His wife – the woman who’d been like a mother to the young girl – would smile too. She always kept her composure; never faltering once as they sat there, week after week, watching monsters and men and unimaginable worlds on that television set. It was only years later that the young girl wondered if, perhaps, the composed woman might too have been scared of the monsters after all.

“… Formless in space… astral travelled…”

She’d known that the couple didn’t have children of their own. Perhaps it was something that had simply never happened for them; nature’s selection, God’s choice, time or circumstance. Or perhaps work and commitments and other people had all conspired to get in the way. She knew that the man with the finely-combed moustache was older than the composed woman. Perhaps they had left it too late. She wondered whether her own presence there helped to curtail the sense of absence they must have carried; the feelings of disappointment that inevitably surrounded a marriage without offspring. Sometimes, she contemplated whether she was filling a void in their lives, like a surrogate daughter. The young girl with the full face and freckles would never have presumed to think of herself in that way, of course. That wasn’t why she had come here, after all; it wasn’t her place.

They had made her welcome, though; the man with the finely-combed moustache and the composed woman. More welcome than she had ever expected to feel, so young and innocent and far from home.

“…made contact with this intelligence?”

The television burned on for hours. No one was watching. That night, the men and the monsters on unimaginable worlds played to a room without an audience.

Later, much later, from beyond the door, there came the sound of someone crying. A deep cry, one that sounded not like the sweet release of tears falling with exultation, or the high notes of relief, but something sorrowful; a mournful lament for the dead. There were no triumphs or celebrations here. Just howls of anguish, shock and pain.

The cry echoed across the landing, down the stairs, and through the hallway. It filled the darkness of a November night. It brought the curtain down on what, for each of them – the man with the finely-combed moustache, the composed woman and the young girl with the full face and freckles – would forever be the last day.

***

(ii)

When she had first come to Rushleigh Hall, she had been in awe of everything. The young girl with the full face and freckles had never been inside a house so big and so spacious before. She remembered admiring the opulent hallway, with its high back chairs and ornately framed mirror. She recalled rounding the spiral staircase that led to the upstairs floor, with its balcony overlooking the gardens and the tennis court outside. She had never understood why there was a tennis court at Rushleigh Hall; neither the man with the finely-combed moustache nor the composed woman had ever played, as far as she knew. She supposed it must have always been there, and so there it had remained.

They had been unwaveringly kind to her; particularly the composed woman, who had taken the young girl with the full face and freckles under her wing. For reasons she had never fully understood, they seemed to have taken a shine to her; a shine that had never faded. She couldn’t recall ever doing or saying anything particularly noteworthy to justify their indulgence and adoration; if anything, she had been somewhat shy and reserved when she had followed up on the advertisement that had originally led her to the row of mansion houses at the southern end of the quaint little village.

She’d been lodging with a family in the town; they’d been hospitable, but they were both advancing in years and the mundane surroundings of the room they let to her had done nothing to dispel the memory of the equally uninspiring life she’d left behind. The allure of Rushleigh Hall was almost magnetic; from the moment she had set eyes on the heavy oak door – replete with the mellow stone into which it was set – and the Hall’s easterly terrace that revealed itself only when she’d passed the gap in the thick, beautifully tendered hedges that lined the drive, she had sensed instinctively that she would find some measure of belonging here.

That had been, she’d thought later, a presumptuous thought; who was she, after all? Still a teenager, in search of a job amongst the Hall’s housekeeping staff, daring to believe that she had some claim – some right – to a place amongst the grandeur of Rushleigh’s wealthy inhabitants. She’d kept her presumptions well contained, of course; her tone when she’d presented herself was decidedly reluctant and uneven. She hadn’t done as well with words in those days. Her decisive flight from the fields of her childhood in search of something more had set her on a journey that meant she was more now than she had once been, but less than she would later become.

It had been her parents who’d first made contact with the Faircloughs; the family with whom she had been lodging. They had been friends of her father’s. He’d insisted that, if he couldn’t dissuade her from making the sudden leap into the wider world she so desired, he could at least ensure that she had the foundations of stability waiting for her there; a roof over her head and a comfortable room if nothing else. She had known immediately that she would need to find work; to meet her living costs and, she hoped, put a little to one side as she strived to branch out further.

The composed woman had shown her around the Hall when she’d first arrived there, articulating her expectations as they went – but with none of the steel or severity that the young girl with the full face and freckles had anticipated. Instead, the woman had been considerate, open, and reassuring. They had offered her the job without hesitation; from then on, she had worked hard, earning a little more than she had been expecting. The other girls – one slightly older than the rest – had received her warmly. The months that followed had been largely uneventful, yet they were still peppered with striking, extraordinary moments that would live on in her memory.

The composed woman had asked her to come shopping with one day. They had taken the train to London together, where the woman had bought an extravagant pearl necklace for herself. The couple had even invited her to stay late one evening; they’d eaten together on the terrace as the sun went down, relishing a supper of slow-roasted pork belly, roasted potatoes and green beans.