This story was originally written and posted in 2003 but vanished into the cyber-ether when the main The Lost World Story Site disappeared. I recently decided to dig out and re-vamp some of my old LW fic and repost them here. It is a sort of 'What if' - Prequel to the expedition and assumes Marguerite and Roxton did indeed meet under somewhat difficult circumstances before the fateful night at the London Royal Zoological Society. The story begins during the First World War and ends with our explorers back in the treehouse...

Usual disclaimers apply - some mature language.

Another Time, Another Place . . .

Part One - May 1915 - The Ypres Salient

Before Midnight

The hands that guided him were firm but gentle as they led his faltering footsteps across the rubble. The man held onto him securely as they made their stumbling way as best they could.

"Not far now, Major." Starling's voice was brittle with false cheer. "We'll bivvy for the night in this old farmhouse. Well, what's left of it, anyhow."

Roxton nodded dumbly, his throat too clogged to speak. He doubted he could even answer. He was surrounded by a nightmare of confusion and his aching head beat like a drum. His foot turned inwards on a pile of loose bricks and the void nearly opened up and swallowed him. The weight dropped away from his body and if it hadn't been for Starling, he would have fallen.

"Steady-on, Sir," The cockney Corporal caught him and shifted his grip, taking a second to recover his bearings. "Only another fifty yards or so to go, then we can get you indoors and take a look at that head wound. The whole road's such a bloody great pothole, mebbe there'll be some others there."

"The gas - " Roxton choked on the words, his sore vocal chords constricting as he felt a rush of saliva forming in his mouth again. He tried once more. "Can't quite catch my breath…" before his throat started closing again.

The terror of it bludgeoned his senses with a terrible cacophony of pain.

Afternoon

The guns had worked their hellish will since first light had broken that morning. The men had been taut and grey with nerves as the lines rattled and shook under one of the most intense bombardments Roxton had ever known. The Old Contemptibles amongst them knew an assault like this could only herald one thing - the Germans were planning an attack. The whey-faced replacements, just shipped out from England, badgered them for information and did their best to hide any fear. Roxton sighed with unaccustomed weariness, most of them were little more than boys. Hardly a man among them more than twenty-one. The latest batch of cannon-fodder.

Alternating between swagger and bravado and silence and terror, they crouched in the trenches and covered their ears against the incessant roar of the guns.

Lord John Roxton had seen it all before. This part of the Ypres Salient had changed hands with regular brutality for the entire time he'd been here. He was now the oldest and only surviving field officer of the proudly optimistic regiment that had left the shores of England in the August of 1914. They had fully expected to thrash the Hun and be home again in time for Christmas Day.

He looked across at his two new Lieutenants with mild despair and more than a hint of presentiment. Each one of them was pink-cheeked and youthfully smooth-skinned; lambs to the slaughter, fresh out of Blighty. One was an Honourable, straight out of Eton, the other an Oxbridge graduate. Full of notions of honour and duty and both of them green as grass. They seemed scared and he really didn't blame them as he wondered if either man shaved yet. He had a horrible nagging feeling they would be dead by the end of the day.

There had been no new information of note from HQ, just the same old tired instructions. There was one hell of a big bombardment; well, he could have told them that. The orders were just as usual, so familiar he could have predicted them. He was to place his company on high alert and hold onto his section of the line. It was nothing he didn't already know. Roxton had sighed as he signed for the briefing; they were rather stating the obvious. 'High alert' was the only real option out here in the hell of the Salient.

Just after four, as the early light began changing, the sentries had sounded the alarm bell, and the first clouds of greenish chlorine gas drifted over towards the British lines. The men had recently been issued with pad respirators, a piece of cotton wadding wrapped in muslin veiling. It was soaked in soda solution the minute the alarm bell sounded. Better than nothing, it bought them a modicum of time, vital minutes to escape the worst of it, but the muslin was woefully inadequate against the deadly asphyxiating gas. This along with a pair of goggles was the only protection afforded them. Roxton watched with a tight-lipped anguish and knew it wasn't enough. The chlorine settled in layers in the sunken pockets of the trenches, and many men started to splutter and drown as their lungs began filling with fluid.

It was the weather that saved them. A brisk and unlikely May wind that blew down from the English Channel and quickly dispersed the ghostly layers of poison. Too little, too late for many of them, and heralding another form of danger. They were vulnerable to an open German attack with the gradual dissipation of the gas.

The trenches were filled with the dead and choking. Roxton had lost Mortlake, his Honourable Lieutenant, within the first few minutes when the youth panicked and delayed putting his gas mask on in time. It was left to him to re-group the men, relying on his more experienced Sergeant's and grim-faced NCOs to organise the stretcher parties and clear the wounded back to the supply trenches.

He kept the surviving Lieutenant alongside him for safe-keeping, knowing full-well a German attack was imminent as he redoubled the lookouts and placed the gunners on high alert. It finally came with the pale light of dawn. Once the Germans were sure the last pockets of gas had gone, they swarmed out of their trenches over no-man's land under cover of a secondary barrage.

His own eyes were still streaming and his throat raw and swollen, but Roxton rallied his men under the onslaught, knowing full well the whole front was under similar siege and no reinforcements would be forthcoming. The situation was increasingly desperate as the gallant Canadians further down the line suffered under the same assault.

The first onrush of German troops poured over the ramparts in grey waves as the Vickers guns chattered in accompaniment to the shrieks and screams of the dying and the constant ear-splitting boom of artillery. Voice cracking with the effects of the gas, Roxton ordered his men to stand fast as the hand-to-hand combat began.

It was frantic and disjointed after that. Roxton fought for his life using the barrel of his rifle as a club. It was quicker and more efficient to crush skulls at close quarters than to waste valuable seconds thrusting in and pulling out a bayonet. A blade which caught fast in the gristly cartilage between the ribs gave your enemy time to strike back.

The graduate Lieutenant dropped like a stone, killed in seconds by a bullet in his temple. Roxton noted his death dispassionately. At least this time, he would not have to lie. For once the condolences would be true when he wrote that their son had died instantly. Not like the usual bunch of standard platitudes which he was forced to write to ease a family's pain.

A figure lurched out of the darkness and Roxton lifted his gun again. His own face was spattered with blood and worse as he caved in another man's head. Kill or be killed – he felt no compunction. The war in the trenches was brutal. All his out-moded concepts of nobility had died. He was in hell. There was no honour here.

In spite of the gas and terrible odds, it seemed as though the tide was turning. The British soldiers fought with tenacity and held onto their sector of the line. Roxton heard the retreat whistles blow and watched the Germans withdrawing, harried back across the desert of no-man's land by remorseless machine gun fire.

He barely heard the shell that struck him.

A high pitched whine shrilled through the air and burst on the lip of the dugout. It exploded yards from where he was standing and a piece of shrapnel glanced off his head. Reaching up, his hand was sticky with blood and the pain in his skull was quite shocking. His legs slid and he felt himself falling as the mud began to shower around him. His last coherent and terrified thought was that he would be buried alive.

"Dear God, I would rather be dead."

They dug him out within minutes, pulling him clear of the quagmire, and then placed him onto a stretcher to be taken off down the line. He vaguely remembered being lifted, and the shouts of the men who passed him, their voices dulled by the sullen beat of his heart and the bombardment still ringing in his ears. Strangely enough, he was floating, separate and disembodied. Shock, he thought vaguely, he'd seen it before. He wondered if he might die. His head throbbed like the veritable devil and the spike in his skull was relentless. The shrapnel wound was bad enough but the rasp in his lungs was worse.

That and the fact he was blind.

At first he thought there was blood in his eyes. His hair and face ran red with it. It had soaked through the breast of his uniform jacket and tasted like salt on his lips. Only when the pain and burning beneath his eyelids reached almost unbearable proportions, did he realise his sight might be damaged. The gas cloud had been thick and choking, chances were, he could end up blind.

The bearers carried him as fast as they could but each step was bloody torture. They treated him quickly at a Dressing Station situated behind the lines. The station itself was a makeshift tent where he was assessed by a team of medics. They irrigated his swollen weeping eyes and bandaged up half of his face. Roxton drifted in and out of consciousness, surrounded by the dead and dying. He lay in a fog of agony as he waited to be moved on again.

After an interval of what seemed like hours, someone gave him a shot of morphine to ease the pain in his chest and he was stretchered out to a field ambulance for transport back to the rear. He was barely aware of their hands on him as a name tag was tied around his ankle, and they propped him up on a knapsack to help relieve the shortness of breath. There was no access to vital oxygen here, not whilst the walls shuddered under bombardment. They were surrounded by live ammunition and the whole place could go up in smoke. There was also an acute danger of being over-run by the enemy. The chance of a break-through German push was unfortunately only too real.

Roxton tried not to panic. His knuckles gleamed white as he clutched onto the sides of the stretcher and fought to control his breathing. If he made it out alive - when he made it out alive - it seemed likely he'd be sent back to England. If he was lucky, he might yet spend a couple of months far away from this dystopian hell.

If he was lucky.

In a sudden poignant vision of his home, he saw once again, the chalk downs and rolling Wiltshire hills of his family's estate near Avebury. The memory filled him with longing and he was struck by a rush of nostalgia. Wheeling kestrels and wide-open meadows lined with hedgerows and a rush of wild-flowers, and the winding roads leading westwards towards the fabled seven hills of Bath. It was ancient and somehow timeless – the landscape steeped in Neolithic mystery, where village churches struggled for ascendancy over assertive lines of marching standing stones.

It had been six long months since he'd been there during his last brief leave back in England, and the thought that he might not see it again wrapped him in depression like a shroud. Might not see it… if the gas had damaged his eyes he was condemned to a life of darkness. If the medics were unable to fix him, he might never see anything again.

The effects of the gas would surely be temporary; he'd worn his protective goggles...

"Here we are then, Major," a cheery cockney voice addressed him. "My name's Corporal Starling an' me an' Private Hanbury are going to shift you down the line and orf to visit some of them pretty nurses at the field 'ospital."

"Thank you, Corporal."

His words came out in a ghastly croak and Roxton barely identified the voice as his own. His vocal chords must have been damaged, he reflected, and even his own mother would be hard-pressed to recognise him now, if she should happen to come upon him.

Starling grasped his shoulder lightly and held a canteen up to his lips. "Take a sip of water, Sir. That's it, nice and steady. It'll 'elp ease your throat a little 'till the wretched swelling goes down."

The water tasted like heaven even though it was brackish and warm. Roxton sucked at it thirstily, but Starling refused to let him have too much, tucking a blanket around him instead as they carried him out of the Dressing Station and back into the darkness.

The guns still sounded terrifyingly near and he could hear the tramp of feet as they passed him. More men on their way up the line to reinforce the depleted positions. Starling and Hanbury spoke to each other in muted tones, sometimes calling out greetings to soldiers moving by as they made their way over the duckboards. A shell fell close to their position sending a shower of mud and debris around them. Roxton jerked and then groaned with pain as they took cover at the side of the trench. As they lifted him, Hanbury lost his grip and the stretcher tilted for a second. No one noticed the identification tag slide off his ankle into the mud.

At some stage soon after he lost consciousness. Waking again as they loaded him into the back of an ambulance, he was aware of the sound of voices speaking across him. He was cold and his teeth were chattering. The pain in his head was much worse. Taking his bearings, he listened hazily as Starling spoke to the driver.

"Another one for you, mate. A Major, no less. Dug 'im out of a shell crater, a dozen men dead all around 'im, lucky blighter." A pause and then, "Hold on 'alf a mo, Stan, there's no I.D tag."

Roxton felt someone's hand on his shoulder. "Can you tell me your name, Sir?"

He furrowed his brow and tried his best, but his head hurt too much to think clearly. All he could see in his mind's eye was an image of his home back in England. There was a driveway winding through open parkland and some strategically planted oak-trees. It led to a mullioned manor house with twelve sloping steps up to the entrance. The doors were vast and studded with iron, blending into the worn stone archway. Leaded windows twinkled on either side and white roses clung to the wall.

"Avebury," He muttered the word in confusion; "but that isn't… it isn't my name."

The ambulance driver spoke impatiently, "Come on lads, we haven't got all night. What was that he said?"

"Something like Amesbury? Now come on, Sir, beggin' your pardon, best you try and rack those brains."

God help him, he couldn't remember his name, Roxton began to feel panicked. Pictures and distant memories of the old house swamped him again. There was a gracious high-ceilinged drawing-room, he recalled it had been his favourite, carved wood panelling and patterned rugs from India, and sunshine stripes across a polished floor.

He was standing there dressed in army uniform and saying goodbye to someone. A beautiful sad-eyed woman with a greyhound curled up at her feet. She was dressed in dove grey satin and the lace at her throat was pinned with a cameo brooch. Her hands had been trembling as they reached for his face and pulled his head down for a kiss. Even though she was smiling, she was trying so hard to be strong.

"Write to me often, Johnny."

He remembered she was his mother and that she had called him John.

"John, my name is John."

"That's good, Sir," Starling spoke kindly. "Now all we need is your surname, I think it was Amesbury you said?"

Roxton tried his damnedest to stay awake, fighting hard against the darkness as the world started slipping away. "Avebury…"

It was his last coherent thought.

In his dreams he was taken back through the years and all the pain and terror fled away. A long ago dawn across a meadow in May with the silver dew wet all around him. He had left the house and stolen out early before his family was even stirring, urging the new hunter to a gallop as they raced through the mist-shrouded fields. It hadn't taken long to reach Silbury Hill as the night began to fade on the horizon, and then onwards, the cut turf flying, as he was drawn by the lure of the stones.

The sun had risen clear and pale like a metallic disc on the horizon. He had dismounted the edgy stallion to wander amongst the ancient megaliths. A little after that he had first seen the girl and her image was ingrained upon his memory. He'd been transfixed, ducking around behind a stone to watch her unseen and enraptured.

He fancied she looked like a faerie child with the dawn mists rising behind her. She wove her way through the stones on her bare white feet as she danced to the music in her head. For one wild heartbeat, he almost heard it too, as he was caught up in the magic of the moment. There was something unearthly about her. Was she flesh, he had wondered, or fey?

Then the hunter had whinnied and broken the spell as she flung her head up and looked straight at him. For one brief moment, her eyes met his – wide and silver, almost otherworldly. He took a step forwards and stumbled, nearly tripping on a tussock of grass. She laughed… he could have sworn she laughed at him, and he rose up determined to challenge her, but with a flash of bare feet, she was gone in a trice, her dim hair flying out like a cloud.

He had ridden back through the village in a forlorn attempt to locate her, but his search turned out to be futile, she was lost like the morning haze. For some reason, he'd been compelled to keep on looking, as though seeing her had somehow bewitched him, but she'd vanished into the break of day as though she had never been.

Perhaps she had been faerie after all…

TBC

Lisa Paris - 2003.