D. Mitchell: The King of Terrors

‘I’ve got most of the answers, Charlie boy,’ he’d say. ‘Most but not all. Got a way to go yet, a few more leads to follow, but this will make me when I publish it. They won’t say I failed ever again, because I’ll have the answer, and boy, is that answer going to knock them dead!’

And young Charles Rayne would simply listen to him. He didn’t pass any judgements on the old man. How could he? He loved him, and he never made a big fuss out of the fact he had to sit in a room with the heavy curtains closed; never really seemed to notice. Once, though, he did pause in talking about his project and, looking querulously about him, said:

‘Strange thing, old chap, having to sit here like you do in the gloom, and only venture outside in the dark.’

‘I’m used to it,’ Charles lied.

‘Nothing wrong with coming out at night, Charlie boy. Nothing wrong at all. Pipistrelles, they come out at night.’

‘Pipistrelles? What are they?’

‘Bats, old chap. Little bats. You’re my little Pipistrelle,’ he said, snaking an arm around his shoulder. He thereafter called him this whenever they met. Privately, of course, never in front of his mother and father. It was their little secret.’

‘They think me mad, old chap,’ he confided in Charles one day.

‘Who would think that?’

He gave a sideways nod of his head to his mother and father downstairs. ‘They think me a bit batty. A bit batty, eh, Pipistrelle?’ They both laughed at the pun. ‘But not a bit of it. Marbles quite in order. Still playing with a full deck, eh, lad?’

The next thing he knew his grandfather was dead, and Charles Rayne was devastated, overcome with debilitating grief, plunged into dark loneliness with his loss. He wasn’t even able to go to the funeral. That’s when he couldn’t take it any longer; he had to get out, into the sunshine, into the fresh air. He did not want to be a bat. He wanted to be human again.

They thought he would die. He wished he would, for now there appeared not a single reason for him to go on living. As he lay in his shadowy, fevered limbo, he once again heard his mother expressing her upset and anger all at once, this time over him. What had she done to deserve this, he heard her rant one evening? Charles felt for her, but he could offer no answer. Some things, after all, are never resolved.

Then the trunk was delivered to his room. ‘Your grandfather wanted you to have this,’ his mother said. He noticed she could not look straight at his bandaged face, and averted her gaze as she placed the hefty keys to the trunk into his bandaged hand.

‘Thank you, mother,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added, his lower lip splitting as he spoke. He dabbed away the blood with his hand. The bandage came away marked with a scarlet dash. He saw how upset this made her.

‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she said hurriedly and left him staring at the trunk.

It was a full half hour before he inserted the key into the huge padlock and lifted the lid. The smell was the smell of his grandfather. There was his army uniform, his medals, a leather binocular case, his battered old trilby. Beneath these everyday items he found notebooks, many of them tied together with string into blocks, each of them numbered and dated. And at the very bottom a number of dusty old books and rolled up maps. He also discovered a quantity of brown cardboard files, these too carefully dated and numbered. They contained press cuttings, pages ripped from books annotated with his florid scribbles in red pencil, photographs, notes, more press cuttings, pieces of paper with nothing more on them than strange symbols. He was drawn to two photographs of a very pretty young woman sat outside in a sort of arbour, the sunlight gilding her smooth cheeks, bouncing off her shining hair. He was instantly captivated by her, and he fell in love immediately. A young man’s love. On the back of each was the name Evelyn Carter. Who was she? Who was this mysterious woman with the enigmatic smile and faraway eyes?

He sifted through more paper and he knew at once that this was his grandfather’s prized project.

He lifted out the topmost set of bound notebooks, titled rather grandly The Unpublished Memoirs of Detective Inspector Thomas Rayne of the Yard.

As he read them he soon came across the case of the Body in the Barn and was drawn into the gruesome tale. And beyond — far beyond, for he realised that the remainder of the trunk’s contents were given over to this single case. For weeks he sifted through the memoirs, the copious notes, the cuttings, the articles, and finally gasped at the enormity of what his grandfather had uncovered, at what he was suggesting.

From that moment, Charles Rayne knew what he must do. He must take what his grandfather had started and make it his life’s work, to finally put to rest the mystery of The Body in the Barn, no matter how extraordinary the findings. And like his grandfather before him he sank down into his work, till it absorbed him fully and he heard his mother say one evening:

‘He’s obsessed with the thing!’ Sounding both upset and angry all at once.

He was reminded very much of the H. G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine; the very beginning of things when the time traveller invites his learned friends around to his house so he can reveal the secret of his experiments. Recall the exciting and bizarre tale of his adventures. Gain their confidence.

The difference for Charles Rayne was that this was the first time he would have met his two friends and colleagues in the flesh. They had communicated animatedly for a number of years by letter and phone. All three of them young and fervently ambitious historians, each in their own way determined to make their mark on their profession and the world. Each taking joy that there were other similar minds to share their passions, their theories and the lust for life that lay ahead. Together they would explore new horizons, shatter conventional belief, to find their own place in history.

They called themselves The Lunar Club.

Charles had suggested the name after the Lunar Society of Birmingham, formed in the 1760s by a group of similarly ambitious, inventive and imaginative young men who would together transform the future — Matthew Boulton and James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestly. Together they not only oiled the wheels of the Industrial Revolution but made them.

Given that Charles could only go outside at night the name appeared doubly fitting. Together they would shine a bright light on the dark past. But tonight the direction of the Lunar Club would take a new and exciting turn. Tonight Charles would lay down a theory that in time would make them notorious, make them legends. But he needed their help, and, like the time traveller, he needed their complete confidence. For what he was about to reveal, the results of many years of study carried out beneath the conventional historical research that had already started to make his name, was an idea so important, so far-reaching, that it would create a tidal wave of attention that would overthrow many entrenched beliefs, and have incalculable ramifications for both the present and the future. It would change everything for all of them.

But first he had to meet them, and Charles Rayne was nervous. They knew of his condition, of course. But the first sight of his disfigured face most people found disturbing. He didn’t want his illness to overshadow events. So he had warned them not to be appalled or upset, and they returned jokingly that they were appalled and upset that he would think such a thing.

He was alone now. Following his parents’ death the house belonged to him. It had become his prison and his sanctuary. His published works were reaching many thousands of people the world over, but he felt he could not travel beyond this small village. He did not wish people to see him. He had to be under cover before daylight. In the end he avoided invitations to conventions, to speak at lectures. No image of him appeared in any of his books. He existed on his reputation, making just enough money to keep his head above choppy financial waters. But he had gathered admirers, fellow historians, who became close friends. Friends that had never met him. But tonight that would change and he grew ever more excited and nervous as the time for their arrival grew near.