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Overture
Chapter 1
Nightmare
For long moments, Gordon wasn’t sure what had woken him. He glanced over at the clock, seeing that it was just past two a.m., and was just reaching for his water glass when a faint, satisfied snore brought him back to reality, and to an unfortunate state of partial recall of the previous evening’s events.
Although it pained him to admit it, Gordon had to own up to the fact that he’d forgotten this young man’s name. The cognac had been an extenuating circumstance, to be sure, and it wasn’t as if he made a habit of bringing tipsy young darlings home, even as pretty as this one was. However, the fact remained that he, Gordon, was going to have to find a way to ask his companion for his name without actually seen to be asking.
Draining the water glass and noting, with some surprise, just how warm the room was for the time of year, Gordon studied his bed partner by the glow of the streetlights outside. There was no denying that he was a beauty; though everything was cast right now in shades of sombre orange, Gordon recalled flashes of blue eyes and thick, wild, naturally blonde hair.
He knew that they’d met in Taffeta, the bar just around the corner from the South Bank studios, but aside from that fact, little else was clear through the hangover. God alone knew that flirting alone was risk enough for a gay man in these times, let alone allowing oneself to knock back enough French brandy to enter that state where a – he quailed slightly at the term – one-night stand seemed like a fabulous idea.
Oh well, Gordon concluded. What’s done is done, but I’d better be a tad more discreet about showing him out the door than I was about showing him in.
Over-confidence, that was the problem. Gordon wouldn’t normally have been in the bar on a weekday night, but for the fact that he’d had some news very well worth toasting. Magnavision had not only renewed his contract for a further four years, but had also invited him to host a new Sunday evening chat show. A signal honour for any aspiring TV mogul, let alone one of Gordon’s comparatively tender years.
He wiped a light coat of sweat from his forehead, and was just about to lie back down to chase the rest of the night’s sleep when the doorbell rang.
Gordon jumped, both figuratively and literally, sitting bolt upright with his heart knocking an uneven tattoo against his breastbone. Panic curdled the blood in his arteries, but he managed to formulate a half-hearted plan of action, and shook the young man beside him.
“Wake up, come on,” he muttered urgently, “there’s someone at the door.”
The lad must have caught some of Gordon’s itchy, infectious terror, because he rolled out of bed at once and grabbed for his clothes, pulling them on with a limber grace that Gordon, even in his agitation, found a moment to envy and admire. Then, this inappropriate pang past, he led the way out of the bedroom and down the darkened stairs to the kitchen.
As the doorbell rang once more, Gordon’s nervous system jangling along with it, he opened the back door, hissing, “Go through the gardens, nobody’ll see you. Go on, I’ll deal with this...”
The young man took to his heels with indecent haste, leaving Gordon to close and lock the back door, leaning on it, his robe clinging to his back where fear had raised a fresh pall of cold sweat. The doorbell rang for a third time, and he started wildly around the kitchen as if he had never seen it before, as if it were something threatening. Then he grabbed a carving knife from the block, the blade making an accusatory hiss as it was withdrawn from its sheath. Then, the steel ice cold against his hot palm, Gordon crossed the kitchen on legs that felt as though they were made of damp paper.
The hall was secluded in gloom; the fanlight over the door allowed a second-hand ochre light to enter, but no more than that. Gordon’s hand was halfway to the light switch when he reconsidered, his movement stayed by some sub-cerebral sixth sense. Instead, he applied his eye to the spy-hole.
This didn’t clear matters up to any great degree. The figure outside was little more than a silhouette, although the wash of the street light on the far side of the road created a fine nimbus around its head. For one catastrophically insane moment, the word ‘halo’ flickered through Gordon’s mind like a small bird and then, as the bell sounded yet again, he placed one sweat-soaked palm on the latch and opened the door.
The visitor raised his head, and Gordon felt his breath catch in his throat just as fast and as surely as if it were barbed. He heard his name spoken in a voice as smooth as glass, but only barely so.
Much later, when he was in a halfway fit state to do so, Gordon tried to piece together his initial reaction in terms of its constituent parts. First and foremost, there was a swelling of bladder-wrenching terror. Second, the undeniable punch of recognition; it was very far from a stranger on his doorstep. It was a face he’d known for the best part of twenty-five years.
Thirdly came the sense of some major slippage in reality, and it was this, more than the other fragments of his gut reaction, that sent Gordon back a step. He’d seen this figure, this visage, this very creature almost every day of his life as a child, but it had never spoken, never drawn a breath, ever stepped unaided over his threshold or anyone else’s. Yet all of this it was now doing.
It was only animal panic that caused Gordon to do what he proceeded to do next. He tried to close the door but as swift as that jolt of fear was, the stranger was swifter. One gloved hand smacked into the wood, and then Gordon heard his name addressed once more.
Still in the grip of the electric current of terror, Gordon brought the knife up from where it had hung at his side but, once more, proved laughably slow when set against the stranger’s reflexes. His wrist was gripped left-handed, in a grasp that was gentle but insistent. Even so, he struggled, and at this he heard a sibilant sigh of exasperation. Then the shadow delivered a cracking blow to his temple, and Gordon Deitrich was, for a time, lost to the world of men.
Gordon awoke to sounds, textures and scents before his vision consented to return. There was the faintest of creaks; the sound of a leather glove being removed. He was aware of someone leaning in close, so close that he felt soft, silken hair brush his cheek like an exploratory moth, and then cool, rough fingers probed deftly beneath his jaw, searching for a pulse.
This processed, Gordon caught the merest hint of some sweet, mingled scent. It was the most enchanting combination of leather, rich, dark wine and some unidentifiable yet heady musk. A cold, damp compress was laid across his burning forehead, and then this beguiling presence retreated in complete silence.
Finally recovering some semblance of control over his muscles, Gordon struggled to sit up. This action brought him no reward other than a fearful pound and thump in his head and, despite his bewilderment, he sank back down with a gasp of supreme endurance.
A voice finally filtered through his sufferance, a voice so measured and so urbane that for a moment he had cause to wonder whether he hadn’t imagined it.
“You’re awake,” it said, not stating the very obvious, more proposing this sally by way of a greeting.
“What the hell happened?” Gordon managed, at some length. His voice sounded broken, even to his own ear.
“I was forced to hit you,” the stranger returned, his voice decked, indeed, with regret, “and for that I must apologise most sincerely. However, you were...overwrought, and that is not conducive to the civilised conversation that you and I must conduct.”
At this point, Gordon ran his tongue over his lips. They felt drier than sand. He tried to speak again and managed some semblance of communication, but he could not decipher the congealed syllables himself, and thus had no reason to believe that the stranger could either. As if in counterpoint to this, however, that soft voice went on.
“I would like you to note,” it said, the essence of tranquillity, “that your home has not been ransacked and that you have been neither injured nor incapacitated beyond that which our initial misunderstanding rendered necessary. I would hope, therefore, that you extract from these facts the conclusion that my purpose here is not nefarious.”
At last, creeping back my increasing degrees, Gordon recovered the main part of his eyesight, and he turned his head as best his prone position allowed. The stranger – Guy Fawkes, his addled consciousness supplied, somewhat hysterically – was seated in an armchair on the far side of the room, his fingers steepled beneath his chin in the deepest contemplation, the only clear part of him that impassive, glossy white countenance. The overhead light was off but, while Gordon had been unconscious, the stranger had lit several candles and placed them on the coffee table between them. These low, dancing flames left particularly deep lagoons of shadow beneath the mask’s brows, ensuring that its eyes loomed larger and more brooding than ever before.
The mask was...different. It wasn’t the candlelight, or the overbearing oddity of the context, or even the silence that appeared all the deeper for the fact that now, the mask lay silent from choice and not from necessity.
It was the inclusion of vitality. In some esoteric manner, the mask seemed to have taken on a persona of its own now that life itself lay behind it. Its eyes, shrouded as they were, nonetheless had a spark to them. Its cheek, once merely painted, now appeared delicately flushed instead, and its smile had been transformed from the acceptable faint humour of a death’s head to a genuine grin of good spirits.
Grasping at the sofa, at his aching head, Gordon sat up as elegantly as a newly born lamb. There was a whisper as the stranger rose and crossed the room, the candle flames jittering in the gentle wash of his passage. Gordon felt a hand laid on his shoulder, but this was in the interest of assistance rather than restraint. He nodded his thanks, and then cleared his throat with some difficulty.
“Who are you?” he croaked, and then coughed again. The stranger turned away for a second, then handed Gordon a glass of blessedly cold water and two aspirins. This done, he retreated to the far side of the room and settled himself back down in the armchair like a nesting raven. At long last, and only after he had stilled himself, did he reply.
“You may call me V,” he pronounced, evenly. Gordon paused, the glass at his lips, and then took a long swig of water.
“That’s it? That’s your name?” he inquired.
“It is not a name as such, Mr. Deitrich,” V corrected him, “it is more in the nature of an entitlement. I have no face save the one I have chosen to adopt. I have no garb of my own, no past to lay claim to. This is anonymity at its highest calling. Should I spoil the masquerade with a name?”
V laced his fingers at this point, and once again Gordon caught that hushed hiss of leather. The sound was distracting out of all proportion to its volume. Nevertheless, he rallied somewhat.
“But do you have a real name?” V laughed gently at this, although this expression was quite devoid of reproach.
“Doubtless I do, although due to the vagaries of circumstance my name, whatever it may have been, is now as much an enigma to me as it is to you. I do not mourn its loss.”
Gordon climbed to his feet, swaying a little in the process. V shifted, catlike, ready to assist him, but Gordon waved a hand to indicate that he had his balance under reasonable control. He paced to the window, lifted the curtain back a fraction, and peered out into the world for a second, his eyes flicking to and fro like caged mice. Then, dropping the curtain back into place, he turned around with one hand plastered to the back of his neck, vaguely aware that it was coated with a tacky layer of drying sweat.
“The big question...V,” Gordon ventured, tasting his words as they emerged, “is this. What do you want with me?”
“For the time being, Mr. Deitrich, I have but one small request: please call your father.” V held up one admonitory finger as Gordon started to interrupt, and then continued.
“I am aware of how surreal all of this must seem, believe me. However, there are some matters that only your father can explain to you. You know me, Mr. Deitrich. My face has been a part of your life since you were a small child. Please do this one thing for me, and contact your father.”
The candles shuddered violently as V stood, shaking out his cloak before drawing it down over his shoulders.
“I shall leave you alone. I will return at sunset, by which time I hope you have the information you require to form a decision.”
Gordon accompanied V to the door, and stood in a light, chilly pre-dawn breeze as V passed him by. He paused, however, on the top step, and turned back. Gordon found his face less than one inch from that angelic mask; so close, in fact, that for one heartbeat he swore he saw the twin glints of V’s eyes behind the fine black mesh.
“I would like you to bear in mind,” V said, his voice now no more than a tender purr, “that when this door closes, you are beholden to nothing. I came to your home with a request, not a command. However, that said, it must be stated that it is I who am beholden to you...and to your mother, and to your father, and to Nelson too. Farewell.”
As much as he longed, in one part, to slam and lock the front door as soon as he had the opportunity to, some power kept Gordon watching as V descended the flagged stone steps and drifted out of sight behind the yew hedge, a suggestion of deeper shadow in the watery blue light of approaching sunrise.
It was not until the afternoon drew around that Gordon recovered the majority of his composure, although he understood that the blame for this vacuity could be laid in equal part on the peculiar events of the previous night and on the resultant lack of sleep. He had spent over and hour and a half on the phone to his father, and had been only mildly surprised that Edward did not appear to have been asleep when the call came.
The details of the story he’d received during that tempestuous phone call were rattling around in his brain like loose change in a pocket, and producing the same discordant notes as they did so. A fire. A man who healed at four times the normal rate, and who had a potent and eerie influence over the world’s most vile-tempered billy goat. The Guy Fawkes costume. Three dead soldiers buried in the old cowshed.
It was this last statement that kept repeating like the echo of a gunshot. Try as he might – and, God knew, the trying was traumatic enough – Gordon could not picture his own father digging three makeshift graves in the packed earth beneath the cowshed floor, much less turning a corpse into each one and then covering them over.
Through all of this cardinal horror, however, one aspect of the conversation could not possibly have been eluded: Edward’s voice was perfectly calm and reasonable. He had spoken not coldly, merely as a matter of fact, telling his tale without either embellishment or omission.
Edward had finished his account of the last several days on a confession of apology. He was sorry, he told his son, that he had given V Gordon’s name and presumed upon his kindness. These words, as genuine as they were, nevertheless ran a chilly rapier through Gordon’s guts.
Beholden to nothing? Of course he was, and it appeared very much as if he’d found himself in this position through no act of his own which was, he was forced to admit, something of a rare happenstance. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t found himself in difficulty enough in his younger years, even avoiding several close encounters with the police and, on one regrettably memorable occasion, suffering a broken nose for his pains in breaking up a drunken fight during his days at university.
Still, all this aside, Gordon had very little, as of yet, to subject to consideration. V had not made any request of him save for the one that he’d already fulfilled. Sunset, however, was just a few hours away, and he was beginning to suspect that, when the time came, he’d be doing his thinking on his feet.
“Hello? Earth to Gordon?”
Gordon set his teacup down with a sharp bang that started both himself and his assistant and sent a small, warm wave over the papers on his blotter.
“God,” he muttered, pulling a fistful of tissues from the box on his desk and dabbing ineffectually at the puddle, “God, sorry, Anne. I really was a thousand miles away...” He stopped, and threw the bundle of sodden tissues into the bin.
Anne regarded Gordon fondly for a second. She was old enough to be his mother and, in certain respects, had unconsciously adopted this mantle when Gordon’s own mother had died some three years previously.
They’d been working together for five years now, ever since Gordon secured his first job with Magnavision, presenting afternoon children’s’ TV. In that time Anne had tactfully shepherded the ambitious if unpredictable young man through rough and smooth, thick and thin, had averted the worst of his occasional drinking bouts and had even had him weep on her shoulder when, during one such alcoholic excess, he’d woefully blurted out the matter of his homosexuality. There was little room left, she felt, for coyness between them.
“Gordon, what’s the matter?” she asked, her tone heartfelt. “You look as if you haven’t slept in days.”
“I had a bad night last night,” Gordon told her, through a jaw-cracking yawn. “Probably the weather. Didn’t you find it awfully stuffy last night?” Anne recognised an attempt at misdirection when she heard it but, knowing very well how to pick her battles, forbore to push the matter, at least for the time being.
“It was, now you come to mention it,” she agreed. “But look, it’s almost half one. I suggest we head over to Starbucks for some espresso and a bit of lunch. That’ll put the fizz back, okay?” As much as Gordon normally detested patronising such corporate megaliths, he was currently in no shape to gainsay the suggestion, and merely nodded wearily.
It would have interested Gordon if he had known that, as he and Anne walked through a light but bitter shower of rain to find some lunch, they passed right over the Piccadilly Line and not forty metres from the rat-haunted alcove where V dozed, curled into a tight foetal ball.
A train thundered past this impromptu lair, making the thin steel door vibrate on its hinges. V paid it scant attention; he was discovering that sleep was coming to be an optional extra of sorts, and something that he could easily do without for long periods of time.
He was naked where he lay. Not wanting to crease or dirty what was, for the moment, the only set of clothes he had in the world, he’d wrapped the costume in a dust sheet he’d found on the platform and stored it carefully within a small niche in the wall. The mask was propped against this bundle. Under any other circumstance, to any other man’s eye, it would have been all but invisible in the near-perfect darkness, but V saw everything in shades of pink and crimson. The curve of its jaw, the lift of its brow, its seraphic smile, its hollow eye sockets. He oscillated between light sleep and watchfulness while all the time this visage – his visage – regarded him blindly.
The floor of the alcove was firm, condensed earth, smooth enough to the touch, and thankfully cool. The wall against which he lay was rough, brushed concrete, but the fibrous scar tissue on his back was more than proof enough against any discomfort this might otherwise have engendered. He bared a lopsided smile in the gloom at this irony; to think that there could ever be any saving grace in incurring such ghastly wounds.
A scuffling had him turning his head up for a second, and then V found himself all but nose to whiskers with a large, hunchbacked brown rat. His cloudy blue eyes found its glittering black ones and, for an eternity of moments, man and rodent studied one another coolly. Then, moving as slowly and deliberately as continental drift, V stretched out one hand, fingers extended toward the rat. Its muzzle buzzed as it sniffed at the proffered digits, but it made mo move either back of forth and appeared to display not one fragment of fear.
Still moving with the grace of a dancer, V sat up, angling his hand now so that it lay palm up on the cold ground. The rat uncreased its back now, and moved forward a little, its tail sliding through the dust and leaving a sine wave behind it. Then, cocking its ears, it stepped onto V’s hand, hesitated only fractionally, and scampered up his arm.
V ignored the pricking of tiny needle claws at his skin, and turned to face the rat as it reached his shoulder. He smiled once more, conscious of the way the muscles on the left side of his face were somewhat slow to respond. Nevertheless, the rat paid no heed to this deficiency and simply applied a small, hot lick to the corner of V’s mouth before beginning to groom itself industriously.
V’s gentle laugh echoed within his noisome crawlspace before it was drowned beneath the roar of another passing train.
Gordon arrived home just after sunset, weighted down by a stack of schedules and scripts. He juggled these out of the back of his car, and had almost reached the top step when the pile began to slide. He grabbed desperately at the papers, and then loosed a small shriek as V stepped out of the shadows of the porch to lend a hand.
V, picking up a sheaf of paper and handing it back to Gordon, saw the small pulse flickering at the man’s throat, and realised that he’d caused him no small alarm.
“I did not mean to startle you, Mr. Deitrich,” V said, head bowed, apologetic. “May I be of some assistance?”
“No, thank you,” Gordon mumbled, his heart still skipping a beat every now and then. He turned over his shoulder. The house was set well back from the road behind thick yew hedges, and the porch itself lay in a decent pool of shadow, but he nevertheless felt precariously exposed. “Let’s go in,” he added. V nodded shortly, stepping aside to allow Gordon to unlock the door.
It wasn’t until they were inside, and Gordon was turning the bolt and drawing the security chain across, that the atmosphere between the two simplified somewhat. Only somewhat, though, Gordon reflected. He was still painfully aware of the business that remained to be negotiated and, with V stood behind his shoulder like an accursed shade, that business was proving intolerably difficult to ignore.
Still, in a plain testament to his basic courage of character, Gordon turned to face his visitor, arms folded defensively. In the murk of the hallway, little could be seen of V besides the mask and, at that, the brim of his hat cut out a crescent of shadow. Thus it was that the only thing Gordon could make out, in the gloom, was that gently smiling mouth. At this point, V removed his hat and set it aside, although this was only the most marginal of improvements.
Gordon led the way into the living room, turning on the overhead light as he did so, purely as a matter of reflex. He was rewarded, however, with a sharp hiss of indrawn breath behind him, and he spun around to see V flick the switch once more.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry,” V responded, his head shaking infinitesimally. “My night vision is gaining strength by the day, but I am finding that it has come at a price.”
Nodding his understanding, Gordon crossed to the table lamp in the corner and lit that instead. This seemed agreeable to V, who removed his cloak and folded it neatly over his arm like a maître d' in some extraordinarily arcane restaurant before laying it over the back of a chair.
“I’ve spoken to my dad...” Gordon began, and then entered a long pause, still unsure as to how he intended to finish the sentence, “...and what he told me led me to understand that I’ve got no choice here.”
“A free man always has a choice, Mr. Deitrich,” V commented, quite without rancour.
“Please call me Gordon. The only ‘Mr. Deitrich’ I know is my father. Anyway,” Gordon continued, perching himself lightly on the arm of the sofa, “what I mean to say is that I’ve only got one choice that I can actually live with. You understand?”
The mask dipped as V angled his head, indicating agreement, and Gordon was struck with the irrational idea that, as absurd as it sounded even in the privacy of his own mind, its expression had altered in that instant.
“I have put your family in enough danger as it is,” V said eventually, “and I would like you to understand that this grieves me and, were it possible, I would not have done so. However, my need is such that I came as a petitioner, first to your father’s door, and now to your own.”
V moved out of the shadows by the door now, and into the mellow if meagre circle of lamplight. The ascetic cast this lent his frozen features was chilling. Gordon shifted uneasily.
“I want to thank you for saving my dad from those soldiers,” he said, softly.
“I believe we are both well aware that it was I who placed him in that situation to begin with.”
“That’s true,” Gordon countered, “but nevertheless. However, since it appears we’re being brutally honest with one another, I have a confession.”
“Yes?” V prompted, smoothly, as Gordon paused to wring his hands first one way and then the other, before clasping his fingers so tightly that his knuckles creaked.
“You frighten me, V. You scare the living daylights out of me. I want to be clear, though, that that’s not a personal remark.” Gordon dropped his head and stared at his own hands as he went on. “What I’m afraid of is what you represent. If everything my father told me is true, and I’ve no reason to believe that it’s not, then we’re all in more trouble than I care to contemplate.”
When Gordon raised his head again, V was standing before him. In the wash of subdued light, he seemed impossibly tall and gaunt, both indecipherable and implacable, like the judge, jury and executioner at the trial of humanity. For one second, Gordon was reminded of Anubis, and wondered if his own heart might or might not outweigh a feather. Then this image flared and died in his mind, and in the spiral of coruscating sparks that it left behind, he gestured at the chair opposite.
“Please have a seat,” he added. He waited until V was settled, then licked his lips nervously before continuing.
“I’ll help you,” he went on, aware as he did so of the click of some mental ratchet slotting into place, indicating a point of no return. “You’d better tell me what you need.”
Gordon listened very carefully as V proceeded to speak.
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