Once again, a tip
of the hat to Brother Edward. I slumped back comfortably in the inglenook, toasting my toes and contemplating Destiny, and wondering whether there wasn’t anything
I
could try selling His Itchiness. Double-glazing, maybe, or aluminium siding – the Hradcany Castle would account for a lot of that …
Then an awful sinking feeling set in. There’s one big
drawback to bunco routines of all kinds. The same old principles of action and reaction apply. The deeper the mark hooks himself, the worse it hurts when he finds out. It makes him ten times meaner when the scam’s shown up, because all the guilt and shame and stupidity he feels, he’s going to offload on to you. That’s hairy enough at the best of times; almost any mark worth taking is going to have
a certain amount of influence. But when he’s an absolute ruler and an even more absolute son of a bitch, with his own personal dungeons and no doubt monogrammed torture chamber as well …
It’s absolutely bloody suicidal. You’d have to be a thicko to try it.
I looked at Kelley,
with his perpetual air of armour-plated good nature. Oh, shit.
A thicko – or an ego. Now I really recognised his type,
one I knew a little too well. A clever dick, a bit of a lad, thought the sun shone out of his exhaust pipe, no doubt. Too damn pleased with himself by half, fooling all these brilliant, powerful people, all of the time. He’d never heard the other half of that one, though, because Lincoln hadn’t said it yet. It just wouldn’t occur to him. Things like that didn’t happen to him, period. When they
did begin to slip it wouldn’t be his fault; it would be Dee’s, mine, anybody’s.
And by the same kind of almost psychopathic blindness he’d be just the lad to risk fiddling around with dubious forces like these brigand creatures, or whatever was behind them. He’d be like a moth round a candle flame at the prospect of power. Risks were something that happened to other people. Kelley would always
win through.
He wouldn’t like rivals, either. I found myself thinking about that poor little Greek alchemist, and who might have put him up to offering the Emperor an untried potion. Maybe there was something more to this hurry of Kelley’s. Maybe he did want me to come to harm, to be sure the power stayed his …
I made up my mind to have a talk with Dee, the first chance I got. A long talk, and
in private. But how the hell could I get him to believe me?
I picked up the black
stone mirror. ‘I’ll have another stab at it.’
Dee beamed. ‘Splendid!’
‘Should we not first turn to the orb?’ insisted Kelley, and now there was a definite distrustful edge to his voice. ‘I’ve ever had the best results with the orb, as you know!’
Dee shook his head firmly. ‘It was with this looking-glass, or stone
rather, we had our first successes here. It may be better suited to a novice. There is great virtue in glasses. With them I made my first essays, after the passages in Pliny, and later with the surfaces of water, wine and other liquids, as related in the
Ars scintillia
of Artephius. Now Psellus—’
Kelley’s shrug could have said a lot of things. I damped down Dee’s discourse, and I was grateful
for that at least. I angled the mirror this way and that. It was well polished in the centre, but the halo of light scratches around the rim gave its reflections a cloudy, suspended look. Probably easy enough to imagine you saw things in there. ‘What do I do?’
Dee was chalking notes on another tablet. ‘What you do now, only with all your mind and soul concentrated upon the truth. Look into the
stone as you would into a great distance. Strive to make clear the smallest flicker. For a simple inquisition such as this we need no great rites of invocation, at least not yet. But let us not neglect a brief prayer for our success.’
Dee’s idea of brief and mine were different. I began to get bored long before he’d finished. All I saw in the stone was my reflection, and I wasn’t too hot on staring
at myself. I saw too much.
What’s worse, there was an annoying tickle in my ear, a buzz almost, as if some kind of insect had got in – not one of Rudolph’s, I hoped. More like a hair; I fidgeted at it with a finger, but that only made it worse. Some kind of tinnitus – maybe this coal-ridden air was giving me catarrh. Lovely; all this, and extra snot.
It was maddening, almost
like an insistent
whisper. The only thing to do was pay no attention and hope it would go away. To distract myself I started looking around the room. Through an open door I caught a glimpse of the wives, stopping to listen as they passed by. Joan had a tolerant smile on her doughy face, like when hubby has his cronies round to watch the big game, but Jane Dee’s looked pinched and nervy. There was nothing much else
interesting, and as the prayer wound down to an amen I let the mirror settle back on my knee. The buzz was still there, louder even and irregular, as if there were shapes in the sound. I was aware of Dee and Kelley looking over my shoulder.
‘I thought—’ began Kelley in a portentous voice, then he stopped suddenly. Dee exclaimed. My jaw dropped in astonishment, but what came out was more like
a scream. I jumped up and more or less flung the mirror down as if it had bitten my fingers. Dee squeaked in horror, but luckily it clattered down among the papers on the table. On what happened next I’m not too clear, though I remember the floor beneath me slowly welling up and sinking like a very slow wave. I don’t think I fainted, but the surf roaring in my ears was my heartbeat, and I was somehow
huddled down on a bench, shivering. Dee shook my shoulder gently. ‘Why, what’s amiss, sir! Whence this fright and alarum?’
I drew a deep
breath. I’d been too dismissive. I’d forgotten that whatever else Kelley was faking, the scrying worked. I just hadn’t realised it would for me, too. ‘Didn’t you bloody
see
?’
‘Aye indeed!’ said Dee paternally. ‘Truly one might well recoil from such an awesome
sight, but there was no need.’
‘There wasn’t?’
‘Why, never so! Did it not speak? No? Ah, well, ’tis my case also. Many times have I been vouchsafed that glorious sight, but ’tis with Brother Edward alone the angelic beings will converse—’
‘Wait a minute,’ I managed to break in. ‘
That
was an angel?’
He looked at me wonderingly. ‘Why, what else? The fair form, the radiant clouds, the high and
noble features—’ He wittered off dreamily.
I was still vibrating with shock. Whatever he’d seen, it pretty clearly wasn’t what I had. But Kelley? His smile gave away exactly nothing. ‘A sight of wonder, as ever. And ere the link was untimely severed, it spoke clearly, to me at all events. Decreeing that we should hold the rites without delay, this very eventide.’
Dee looked troubled. ‘Brother,
are you certain? There was only that momentary vision. We should enquire further.’
Kelley considered. ‘No doubt you’re right, Brother. Perhaps Master Maxie’s vision was distorted by weariness and ill-preparation.’
Dee exclaimed with relief. ‘That will be it, indeed! My young sir, I owe you an apology. In my zeal I’d forgotten you have had many days of travail and sleeplessness ere this. Wife,
is our friend’s chamber prepared? Then do you light him to it, with our grace. Fear no evil intrusion; I have shielded this house against it. You shall sleep as long as you will, Master Maxie, and in safety, and with your awakening we shall seek clearer counsel.’
It could only have
been midmorning, but the prospect of bed was like being sandbagged with a blanket. My limbs went laden, and the
idea of just stretching out and thinking of sod all seemed irresistible. I mumbled my goodbyes, and let Jane Dee, candle in hand, lead me up the narrow, shadowy stair to the upper rooms, where a door stood open. Her manner was as cool and aloof as ever, but there was something else in it. She kept glancing at me, as if she was hovering on the edge of a question. The room looked bare, with nothing
but a carved wooden press, a bench and a narrow bed with posts and heavy curtains; but right then anything short of an antheap would have looked inviting. She set the candle down on the table and began to draw back the curtains, but hesitated, twisting her hand nervously in the heavy fabric.
‘Gentle zur—’ Her accent sounded far broader than the mens’.
‘Yes, er … my lady?’
‘May I ask of thee
… wast truly an angel thou sawst?’
‘I don’t know, my lady. Since you ask – I don’t think so.’
‘Yet my ’usband and Maisteer Kelley—’
‘Perhaps your husband saw something else.’
‘And Maisteer
Kelley? To him it spoke, did it nowt?’
‘Well … I heard something that might have been a voice, or voices. But that too—’
‘No angelic likeness?’
It still made me shiver. I avoided her eye. ‘I … can’t say.’
She looked at me properly for the first time. ‘I thank thee ne’er the less, good sir. Rest and be ’ealed of thine affright.’ She did me a deep curtsey, then turned away before I could say anything else. She strode out with smooth dignity, her wide skirt sweeping the threshold, and closed the door softly. There was something lithe in her walk that suggested good legs underneath. Ah well, chalk
up one more mystery Maxie would never solve.
Whose bed would she go to? Brother Bastard Kelley’s? Or did they share – no, that was about more than I could stand to imagine. His type – his bloody type. I knew my moment of terror had loused up my great idea, but I was too exhausted to care. I stripped down to my new silk underwear and dived between the coarse linen sheets, sinking into the feather
mattress like a fat aunt’s embrace. It felt good, and sleep came racing up on me like a train. But behind it there was a restless, feverish feeling. Suddenly I had the leisure to realise just how far from home I was, out of my time, out of my place, surrounded by menaces, very much alone. In every sense. And the train had a shrieking whistle—
I woke up sharply, instantly, with my fists clenched.
Somebody had said something, not loudly, but clearly, about an inch from my ear. I couldn’t remember what. I pulled back the curtains, but the room was empty. The sun shadow on the wall had hardly shifted. I must have been asleep for minutes at the most. Breathing hard, I sank back again. And back, and back …
Falling through
the bolster, through the moulded mass of feathers and down into blackness.
What I did best, wasn’t it? Falling. I’d been doing it all my life. Images came crowding in – the chilly cling of the school bed sheets as I lay awake the night I’d been expelled, afraid of my father coming to get me next morning. The gloating face of the teacher who hated ‘my type’. The jeering cops pulling me out of my first car wreck. The ripping sound as my wrist tore the neckline of my
first girlfriend’s party dress. The prison warders suddenly laying into me on the last night of my trial, spitting with class hatred. The stink of my first cellmate, a crop-headed type who mugged pensioners and amused himself putting the frighteners on me. Slopping out next morning – every morning. The muck and chill of the gutter on my first night out, picked up puking drunk by a tart and ripped
off for everything I carried. Hopeless, dragging job interviews, where they started staring out of the window. The stocks I’d been sold crashing to junk values, the horses that narrowly missed a place; the one outsider that made a killing, and the bookie’s goons mugging me when I came to collect. The blank-faced bank adviser telling me my last cash had been swallowed up by all sorts of peculiar charges,
and the overdrafts were being called in. Suddenly even the horrible hot dampness of my pants at kindergarten and the voice of my nanny, the vicious old bitch.
Where the hell was all this coming from? It didn’t feel like anything I was doing. More as if somebody’d run a line into my unconscious and started fishing for all the really juicy humiliations they could. I struggled to fight clear of
them, and sink free into the black oblivion of proper sleep. But that began to feel worse and worse, because the blackness seemed to take on a glassy glimmer like that bloody mirror. It scared me shitless, in case that thing appeared again.
It had come and
gone in a moment. It could just have been one of those little half-erotic daydreams you get, a coincidence of shape and colour somewhere in
the reflection that suggested the shapes of two women, naked, seen from behind, lying languorously stretched out foot to foot as if one was the other’s mirror image, forming a wide flattened V. An olivey Mediterranean glow to their skins, their black curls streaming out into darkness, suggested the women from the bandit gang. But the image lingered that instant longer. Nothing actually changed;
but the greenish glow of their skin seemed more intense, the serpentine shadow of their spines became blacker against it and with really horrible suddenness the women were suddenly slanted, glaring eyes. Eyes without a face, like glowing slashes in a dark curtain; but feral, hungry eyes, fearfully aware, aware of me.
So I yelped, and I chucked down the mirror. But here it was, the surface of
my sleep rising to meet me, and mirrored in it was that growing glare. Suspended between waking and nightmare, I struggled and threshed with limbs that felt manacled. Women. It was women I saw, not eyes; make it women …
Women it
was – a woman. The whip artist, smirking all over her predatory face, drawing the black tongue luxuriously across her breasts.
Whips aren’t exactly my thing at the best
of times, least of all now. Not her! Some other woman. Trace. Maddy the Table Dancer. Red-haired Georgina. Any; all. No good, I couldn’t summon up a single one, not even Lyd who worked in the Jaguar dealership with all the leather upholstery and drove an original E-type. The E-type I could get, the upholstery even, but no Lyd.
Somebody else, somebody more recent. That barmaid Poppy, all cheery
dairymaid curves, wholesome as wholemeal. She was just a blank. What I got instead, and vividly, was Jane Dee, with that lush shape and haunted eyes. A real woman, the kind I’d never had a chance with. And that bastard Kelley …
Fire spurted in the school roof suddenly, that teacher vanished under a rain of tiles; the party dress tore wider, and spilled her breasts into my hands. My fist sank
into that lousy tyke’s face, and the warders bobbed and cringed away from the new hard man; I splashed the slop pail at them, and the other cons cheered. Bank managers grovelled and paid damages, the bookie’s goons were swept aside as by a rushing wind and I had him by the astrakhan collar and flicked the little knife open right under his red-veined nose. Then that thieving bitch and her pimp, next,
the tearing sound, the scream choked off …