‘Now, great spirits,’ Ware said, ‘because ye have diligently answered me and shown yourselves to my demands, I do hereby licence ye to depart, without injury to any here. Depart, I say, yet be ye willing and ready to come at the appointed hour, when I shall duly exorcise and conjure you by your rites and seals. Until then, ye abide free. Amen.’
He snuffed out the fire in the brazier with a closely fitting lid on which was graven the Third or Secret Seal of Solomon. The murk in the refectory began to lift.
‘All right,’ Ware said in a matter-of-fact voice. Strangely, he seemed much less tired than he had after the conjuration of M
ARCHOSIAS
. ‘It’s over – or rather, it’s begun. Mr Ginsberg, you can safely leave your circle now, and turn on the lights.’
When Ginsberg had done so, Ware also snuffed the candles. In the light of the shaded electrics the hall seemed in the throes of a cheerless dawn, although in fact the time was not much past midnight. There was nothing on the altar now but a small heap of fine grey ash.
‘Do we really have to wait it out in here?’ Baines said, feeling himself sagging. ‘I should think we’d be a lot more comfortable in your office – and in a better position to find out what’s going on, too.’
‘We must remain here,’ Ware said firmly. ‘That, Mr Baines, is why I asked you to bring in your transistor radio – to keep track of both the world and the time. For approximately the next eight hours, the area inside these immediate walls will be the only safe place on all the Earth.’
Trappings, litter and all, the refectory now reminded Baines incongruously of an initiation room in a college fraternity house just after the last night of Hell Week. Hess was asleep on the long table that earlier had borne Ware’s consecrated instruments. Jack Ginsberg lay on the floor near the main door, napping fitfully, mumbling and sweating. Theron Ware, after again warning everyone not to touch anything, had dusted off the altar and gone to sleep – apparently quite soundly – upon it, still robed and gowned.
Only Baines and Father Domenico remained awake. The monk, having prowled once around the margins of the room, had found an unsuspected low window behind a curtain, and now stood, with his back to them all, looking out at the black world, hands locked behind his back.
Baines sat on the floor with his own back propped against the wall next to the electric furnace, the transistor radio pressed to his ear. He was brutally uncomfortable, but he had found by experiment that this was the best place in the hall for radio reception – barring, of course, his actually entering one of the circles.
Even here, the reception was not very good. It wavered in and out maddeningly, even on powerful stations like Radio Luxembourg, and was liable to tearing blasts of static. These were usually followed, at intervals of a few seconds to several minutes, by bursts or rolls of thunder in the sky outside. Much of the time, too, as was usual, the clear spaces were occupied by nothing except music and commercials.
And thus far, what little news he had been able to pick up had been vaguely disappointing. There had been a major train wreck in Colorado; a freighter was foundering in a blizzard in the North Sea; in Guatemala, a small dam had burst, burying a town in an enormous mud slide; an earthquake was reported in Corinth – the usual budget of natural or near-natural disasters for any day.
In addition, the Chinese had detonated another hydrogen
device; there had been another raiding incident on the Israeli-Jordanian border; black tribesmen had staged a rape and massacre on a government hospital in Rhodesia; the poor were marching on Washington again; the Soviet Union had announced that it would not be able to recover three dogs and a monkey it had put in orbit a week ago; the U.S. gained another bloody inch in Vietnam, and Premier Ky put his foot in it; and …
All perfectly ordinary, all going to prove what everyone of good sense already knew, that there was
no
safe place on the Earth either inside this room or without it, and probably never had been. What, Baines began to wonder, was the profit in turning loose so many demons, at so enormous an expenditure of time, effort and money, if the only result was to be just like reading any morning’s newspaper? Of course, it might be that interesting private outrages were also being committed, but many newspaper and other publishers made fortunes on those in ordinary times, and in any event he could never hear of more than a fraction of them over this idiot machine.
Probably he would just have to wait until days or weeks later, when the full record and history of this night had been assembled and digested, when no doubt its full enormity might duly appear. He should have expected nothing else; after all, the full impact of a work of art is never visible in the sketches. All the same, he was obstinately disappointed to be deprived of the artist’s excitement of watching the work growing on the canvas.
Was there anything that Ware could do about that? Almost surely not, or he would have done it already; it was clear that he had understood the motive behind the commission as well as he had understood its nature. Besides, it would be dangerous to wake him – he would need all his strength for the latter half of the experiment, when the demons began to return.
Resentfully but with some resignation too, Baines realized that he himself had never been the artist here. He was only the patron, who could watch the colours being applied and the cartoon being filled, and could own the finished board or ceiling, but had never even in principle been capable of handling the brushes.
But there – what was that? The BBC was reporting:
‘A third contingent of apparatus has been dispatched along the Thames to combat the Tate Gallery fire. Expert observers believe there is no hope of saving the gallery’s great collection of Blake paintings, which include most of his illustrations for the
Inferno
and
Purgatorio
of Dante. Hope also appears to be lost for what amount to almost all the world’s paintings by Turner, including his watercolours of the burning of the Houses of Parliament. The intense and sudden nature of the initial outbreak has led to the suspicion that the fire is the work of an incendiary.’
Baines sat up alertly, feeling an even more acute stab of hope, though all his joints protested painfully.
There
was a crime with real style, a crime with symbolism, a crime with meaning. Excitedly he remembered H
ABORYM
, the demon with the dripping fire brand. Now if there were to be more acts that imaginative …
The reception was getting steadily worse; it was extraordinarily tiring to be continuously straining to filter meaning out of it. Radio Luxembourg appeared to have gone off the air, or to have been shut out by some atmospheric disturbance. He tried Radio Milan, and got it just in time to hear it announce itself about to play all eleven of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, one right after the other, an insane project for any station and particularly for an Italian one. Was that some demon’s idea of a joke? Whatever the answer, it was going to take Radio Milan out of the newscasting business for well over twenty-four hours to come.
He cast further about the dial. There seemed to be an extraordinary number of broadcasts going out in languages he did not know or could even recognize, though he could get around passably in seventeen standard tongues and in any given year was fluent in a different set of three, depending on business requirements. It was almost as though someone had jammed an antenna on the crown of Babel.
Briefly, he caught a strong outburst of English; but it was only the Voice of America making piously pejorative sermonettes about the Chinese fusion explosion. Baines had known that that was coming for months now. Then the multilingual
mumbling and chuntering resumed, interspersed occasionally with squeals of what might indifferently have been Pakistani jazz or Chinese opera.
Another segment of English shouted, ‘… with Cyanotabs! Yes, friends, one dose cures all ills! Guaranteed chockfull of crisp, crunchy atoms …’ and was replaced by a large boys’ choir singing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ the words for which, however, seemed to go, ‘Bison, bison! Rattus, rattus! Cardinalis Cardinalis!’ Then more gabble, marvellously static-free and sometimes hovering just on the edge of intelligibility.
The room stank abominably of an amazing mixture of reeks: brandy, camphor, charcoal, vervain, gunpowder, flesh, sweat, perfume, incense, candle wicks, musk, singed hair. Baines’s head ached dully; it was like trying to breathe inside the mouth of a vulture. He longed to take a pull at the brandy bottle under his rumpled alb, but he did not know how much of what was left would be needed when Ware resumed operations.
Across from him, something moved: Father Domenico had unlocked his hands and turned away from the small window. He was now taking a few prim steps towards Baines. The slight stir of human life seemed to disturb Jack Ginsberg, who thrashed himself into an even more uncomfortable-looking position, shouted hoarsely, and then began to snore. Father Domenico shot a glance at him, and, stopping just short of his side of the Grand Circle, beckoned.
‘Me?’ Baines said.
Father Domenico nodded patiently. Putting aside the overheated little radio with less reluctance than he would have imagined possible only an hour ago, Baines heaved himself arthritically to his knees, and then to his feet.
As he started to stumble towards the monk, something furry hurtled in front of him and nearly made him fall: Ware’s cat. It was darting towards the altar; and in a soaring arc incredible in an animal of its shameless obesity, leapt up there and settled down on the rump of its sleeping master. It looked greenly at Baines and went itself to sleep, or appeared to.
Father Domenico beckoned again, and went back to the window. Baines limped after him, wishing that he had taken
off his shoes; his feet felt as though they had turned into solid blocks of horn.
‘What’s the matter?’ he whispered.
‘Look out there, Mr Baines.’
Confused and aching, Baines peered past his uninvited and unimpressive Virgil. At first he could see nothing but the streaked steam on the inside of the glass, with a spume of fat snowflakes slurrying beyond it. Then he saw that the night was in fact not wholly dark. Somehow he could sense the undersides of turbulent clouds. Below, the window, like the one in Ware’s office, looked down the side of the cliff and out over the sea, which was largely invisible in the snow whorls; so should the town have been, but it was in fact faintly luminous. Overhead, from frame to frame of the window, the clouds were overstitched with continuous streaks of dim fire, like phosphorescent contrails, long-lasting and taking no part in the weather.
‘Well?’ Baines said.
‘You don’t see anything?’
‘I see the meteor tracks or whatever they are. And the light is odd – sheet lightning, I suppose, and maybe a fire somewhere in town.’
That’s all?’
That’s all,’ Baines said, irritated. ‘What are you trying to do, panic me into waking Dr Ware and calling it all quits? Nothing doing. We’ll wait it out.’
‘All right,’ Father Domenico said, resuming his vigil. Baines stumped back to his corner and picked up the radio. It said:
‘… now established that the supposed Chinese fusion test was actually a missile warhead explosion of at least thirty megatons, centred on Taiwan. Western capitals, already in an uproar because of the napalm murder of the U.S. President’s widow in a jammed New York discotheque, are moving quickly to a full war footing and we expect a series of security blackouts on the news at any moment. Until that happens we will keep you informed of whatever important events come through. We pause for station identification. Owoo. Eeg. Oh, piggly baby, I caught you – cheatin’ on me – owoo
Baines twisted the dial savagely, but the howling only
became more bestial. Down the wall to his right, Hess twisted his long body on the table and suddenly sat upright, swinging his stockinged feet to the floor.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said huskily. ‘Did I hear what I thought I heard?’
‘Dead right you did,’ Baines said quietly, and not without joy; but he, too, was worried. ‘Slide over here and sit down. Something’s coming to a head, and it’s nothing like we’d expected – or Ware either.’
‘Hadn’t we better call a halt, then?’
‘No. Sit down, goddamn it. I don’t think we
can
call a halt – and even if we could, I don’t want to give our clerical friend over there the satisfaction.’
‘You’d rather have World War Three?’ Hess said, sitting down obediently.
‘I don’t know that that’s what’s going to happen. We contracted for this. Let’s give it the benefit of the doubt. Either Ware’s in control, or he should be. Let’s wait and see.’
‘All right,’ Hess said. He began to knead his fingers together. Baines tried the radio once more, but nothing was coming through except a mixture of
The Messiah
, Mahler and The Supremes.
Jack Ginsberg whined in his pseudo-sleep. After a while, Hess said neutrally:
‘Baines?’
‘What is it?’
‘What kind of a thing do you think this is?’
‘Well, it’s either World War Three or it isn’t. How can I know yet?’
‘I didn’t ask you that … not what you think it
is
. I asked you, what
kind
of a thing do you think it is? You ought to have some sort of notion. After all, you contracted for it.’
‘Oh. Hmm. Father Domenico said it might turn out to be Armageddon. Ware didn’t think so, but he hasn’t turned out to be very right up to now. I can’t guess, myself. I haven’t been thinking in these terms very long.’
‘Nor have I,’ Hess said, watching his fingers weave themselves in and out. ‘I’m still trying to make sense of it in the old terms, the ones that used to make sense of the universe to me. It
isn’t easy. But you’ll remember I told you I was interested in the history of science. That involves trying to understand why there wasn’t any science for so long, and why it went into eclipse almost every time it was rediscovered. I think I know why now. I think the human mind goes through a sort of cycle of fear. It can only take so much accumulated knowledge, and then it panics, and starts inventing reasons to throw everything over and go back to a Dark Age … every time with a new, invented mystical reason.’