The Final Tale of Andrew Lahr | Part 2 | Read It For Free Today

THE FINAL TALE OF ANDREW LAHR

Copyright 2023 by Adrian Vladimir

This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system of any kind, without prior written permission of the author.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I'd like to thank the authors and editors who helped me bring this story to life: Stacey Longo, David Daniel, Ursula Wong, and Rob Smales. Most of all, I'd like to thank my wife, Jordana, who never complains no matter how many times she has to go over a manuscript with her savage red pen.

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TWO

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With shaking hands, I removed a scroll from the box. It was sealed with crimson wax and stamped with my uncle’s personal mark: a single blazing star above a sarsen stone, nearly identical to one of the standing stones of the famed Stonehenge of England.

Beneath the scroll rested a brass amulet. With shaking hands, I broke the seal and tore at the scroll, discovering this note written in my uncle’s familiar hand:

Dearest Andrew,

If my lawyer has called on you, then fate has escorted me into the final mystery. Ownership of my estate will now pass to you; do with it what you will, but never sell it—never—for the henges must be forever preserved. Know that you will receive money enough to last you perhaps two years, more if you are clever with it. Forgive me, but my accounts have not fared well these past years.

My heart stumbled upon reading these words, and tears formed. My uncle had been dead but a few months and had raised me from boyhood. How I missed him!

Within this box you shall find the answer to your deepest desire. Keep this amulet close to your heart, and perhaps you will discover true inspiration at last.

I picked up the amulet—a narrow brass disc with a polished center of glass on a cheap twine necklace—and grew amazed as I touched it, for symbols appeared along its flattened edges. Thirteen runes of a mysterious and magical nature, some of which I recognized from my uncle’s teachings. I promptly put it on, and the symbols faded back into the brass.

All I ask is that when the rainbow stars begin to fade on some distant day, you return home on the night of the summer solstice and remember me properly. Indulge in a bit of ale or whiskey, but weep not, dear boy, for your magnificence will surely blaze across the sky like a falling star. Grasp the heat of above and below, and wrestle it into the pen, for imagination is the spark that ignites the fires of life.

Signed,

Emmett Lahr Knight of the Solstice Stone

Cryptic and coded, as was the custom with my uncle. But I confess that I was relieved to not only have been remembered, but also to be aided in his absence by the very one who was absent. Irony is not only reserved for the tall tale, it seems!

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What became of my dear uncle, you may wonder? It was murder, I assure you. It is true that Emmett was fond of strong drink and equally fond of debate, especially when emotions might overcome good sense.

“That’s the moment when the truth lies exposed, the moment you might know the heart of your fellow man,” he would say.

But the night he met his doom, I believe he was unaware that self-righteousness and savagery were swirling into a heady, dangerous brew. The townspeople consumed it.

I imagine my uncle’s rich, booming voice emanating from his portly build as he debated the Reverend Thomas that night in the pub.

“It is not the reciting of holy passages that brings mankind closer to divinity,” Uncle Emmett proclaimed. “It is not the moral fortitude strived for in church—but not in practice—through which we ascend. It is the imagination that drives us into the passions that sustain the soul: the warmth of a tear wetting the pages of a sad tale, the final stroke of a painter’s brush elevating oil and pigment to the celestial, or the madness of creation that drives the sculptor’s chisel as he shapes stone into art. Imagination is man’s dominion, and it is divinity!”

“You’re a damned occultist. That is heresy!” the Reverend Thomas shouted, leaping to his feet. “It is only through God’s will that mankind may seek salvation! All else is arrogance!”

My uncle was an old mule and not prone to giving ground easily.

“Guilty as charged, Revered, but perhaps you can enlighten me. Are we not made in the creator’s image?”

“Surely, we are.”

“Then you betray yourself. The creator is, by definition, a creator, and so we must be creators as well. One does not create without imagination, and thus imagination is divinity.”

At this, Reverend Thomas was at a loss for words, and the argument devolved into name-calling and charges of the most unbecoming nature. I suspect Reverend Thomas was baiting the hook, for many of his Sunday flock were present that evening. My uncle was but one, and the Reverend Thomas was many. So much for righteousness.

They pursued my uncle from the pub, and he did as many would: he fled for his life to his most beloved sanctuary. Hidden in the tangled vines at the back of this estate, an ancient henge constructed by a forgotten people stands upon the plateau of a hill. It is a ring of great standing stones arranged in a circle and aligned toward celestial events, undoubtedly of a pagan origin my uncle knew all too well.

It was thought cursed and was avoided by all save my uncle and I, the stones etched with markings only my uncle could comprehend. It was here that my uncle’s workshop stood, constructed around the summer solstice stone itself. It was within these walls that his most sacred magic resided.

I was never allowed in.

Trapped, my uncle met his doom inside his workshop. I had not been present at the pub—I construct this tale based on my understanding of that tragic night. Discovered and detained at gun point, I could only cower in my room. I begged my captors to intervene, to stop this unholy act, but for naught. Soon the pyre’s glow from the outskirts of the property lit the night.

You see, when Uncle Emmett barricaded himself inside, they set fire to his workshop. The flames burned long, hot and unnaturally white, as if a star had fallen. Reverend Thomas and the farmers grew afraid and all too soon they fled, their illusions of might exposed for their truer nature: cowardice.

I was left alone, too late to act. I watched my uncle’s burning, seared by the heat of his merry old soul. When the rain came in the morning and extinguished the blaze, only ash, twisted glass, and bits of metal remained.

The fire had burned so hot that the solstice stone around which my uncle had built his workshop was as white as bleached bone, the ancient stones cracked. I found only a part of my uncle’s body, a single eye socket within an orb of skull. His was a tiny grave, unmarked, at the base of the solstice stone so that he would be disturbed no more.

I imagine his laughter at such a dramatic exit; I’m certain it suited him.

Still, I wept at the loss for he was my only companion and kin and had guided me in mysterious ways since I was a boy. I was left alone and short of friends in the town of Monson, for I was Andrew Lahr, nephew of the sorcerer. I became accustomed to sideways glances, and traveled roundabout ways to town, never staying in one place too long.

Although my uncle dabbled in many things, I was ignorant of his business dealings, and so I had little income and less to occupy my days. For months, I roamed the crumbling halls of my uncle’s mansion, uncertain of my fate and seeking solace in whiskey and absinthe. The crumbling windows leaked in the rain, angles of sunlight knifed through holes in the roof, and stones plopped unceremoniously to the floor from once grand hearths. My uncle had never employed servants of any kind, and he wasn’t the sort to trouble himself with repairs, lost in his studies as he so often was.

I know nothing of carpentry and had existed as a sycophant since I was a boy, my uncle believing in my potential as a writer of the most fantastic fictions. Emmett had been deeply obsessed with the belief that imagination is an expression of our divine spirit.

“Your imagination shall be the key that unlocks the door to your greatness, dear Andrew!” he grandly proclaimed on more than one occasion.

I believed him.

With my beloved uncle gone, I was lonely and alone, and despair took me, for I was not even able to find solace in Emmett’s most sacred teachings. His books and spells would have come to me in time, but now they were ash. The idiots of Monson robbed me of the mysteries that were to be my inheritance. I was enraged, and so I sought to quell my agony in the way I knew best—to write! To pen a magnificent tale fit for Chaucer, for Walpole, for Shelley.

I worked day and night as I strove to make Emmett proud in death, to fulfill the greatness he had always believed resided in me. I sought solace in the tale, the story, that strange old belief that imagination was life—until I could go on no longer.

Then the lawyer arrived just in time, and I dared to wonder if there might be life again.

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Life again! But of what sort? And at what price? Andrew is about to find out in The Final Tale of Andrew Lahr - Part 3!

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