A Dusk of Demons (16 page)

It was a relief when the darkness began to lessen: I could see the strand I was working on more clearly. The moon, I thought, breaking through again. But the light became brighter, and brighter still, and looking up I saw it was not the moon.

An illumination was spreading out from the top
of the tower. It looked beautiful and innocent, a silvery path of wonder, but with cowering heart I knew just what it was, and to what horror that radiance would give birth. Paddy knew too: I heard her moan.

It started as a single dot of jet in the center of the brightness. The dot swelled, and budded, and opened like a flower, but the flower was a rotting face. Individual features showed clear—jagged bloody tooth, crumbling nose, baleful dripping eye—but the whole was a festering mess of corruption. I had seen it before, or something very like it, at Summonings. But here it was bigger and closer, and the dripping eye was fixed on me.

Attached to the face was a body of equal foulness, sprouting boneless arms and clawed hands. I shrank away as the talons stabbed down at me, and the knife dropped from my nerveless fingers. Just when I was sure the claws must reach and rip me, the Demon swerved away. But a second had grown behind the first, and a third and fourth.

The howling had begun too, without words but full of hate and the promise of torment and death.
It was many-voiced: The radiance had spawned more monsters than I could count and went on spawning more. They writhed in a snakelike tangle across the sky, weaving ghastly patterns from which individual fiends plunged down, each descent more terrifying than the last. Like cats with mice, it was a dance that must end in death. The patterns narrowed and converged toward the spot where I crouched in terror.

Brain and breast and bowels seemed on the point of bursting. I was gripped by an urge to run, though knowing I could not outrun them. Paddy moaned again, and I saw her in the stark light, bound and powerless.

It was not courage which stopped me fleeing, for I had none left. It was despair rather, and the bitter realization that I could not betray her a second time. As the next Demon swooped and its screeching drilled my ears, I fumbled for the gun. Blindly still, I found cartridges, broke open the breech, and pushed them into place. Somehow I got the gun to my shoulder and fired.

For an instant the explosion blotted out all other
sound, but from its echoes the howling rose again . . . and the faces were coming still, and the clawing hands. But how could it have been otherwise—how could anything fashioned by man even touch a creature from the moon? Mordecai had mocked at Demons, but Mordecai had not seen them as I saw them now.

Looking up at the chimney's top etched against the light, I recalled the words of his mockery. “I've seed a sight of high places but never a Demon's nest . . . it's as though they're reserved special for sassenachs . . .”

They come out from tops of mills, he had said, or old chimney stacks, or tall masts. “A Demon's nest . . .” Could it mean such places were their aeries, that it was there they lived and not in the distant moon? It made no difference—if Demons were invulnerable, their nests must be too—but I still had a barrel loaded. Despair and hatred joined hands. Not blindly now but with cold purpose I lifted the gun, took aim on the chimney's top, and squeezed the trigger.

A second time the echoes of the explosion died,
but this time into an aching silence. I looked at an empty sky, where the only light was from the moon, cruising a quiet sea between coasts of cloud. Sounds followed then, but no more than the clatter of falling fragments of brick and stone.

“What happened?” Paddy asked faintly.

“I don't know.”

“Cut me loose?”

I retrieved the knife and set to work. It wasn't long before the last strand parted, and I could help her out of the Demons' Chair.

•  •  •

We took the road that led most directly north. Our progress was not swift: Paddy was stiff and limped, from having been tied up. We did not speak. There could be ears behind the shutters of the houses we passed, tongues to wag next morning.

The town seemed to stretch even further in this direction, but at last we reached open country. The only signs of life were reclining cattle, breathing silvery plumes into the moonlight. When something ran across the road in front of us, Paddy asked “What was that?” in curiosity rather than alarm.

“Charlie Fox,” I said, “looking for breakfast.”

She said with feeling, “I could do with some. The women said food would only be wasted on Demon fodder.”

I asked, “Why
were
you condemned?”

“You were there.”

“But before that. You scratched Ramsay, didn't you? I saw the marks on his face.” Paddy shook her head. “I don't want to talk about it.” It would be useless to persist, and I did not really want to. I told her about escaping from Johnson and going back for the gun. Knowing her gift for fastening on weak spots, I thought she might ask me why I'd thought that was a sensible idea, and didn't know what to say if she did. Though in fact, and in a way I still could not understand, the gun had saved us. But she picked on another point.

“You fired twice. The first shot didn't work.”

I explained that I'd aimed the second barrel not at the Demons but at their nest.

“I don't see why that should make a difference.” I had no answer. After a pause, she said, “Do you think they'll come back—the Demons?”

“No. They've gone. They won't come back.”

I wished I were as confident as I hoped I sounded. The fact that I had shattered their nest and made them vanish meant they were less omnipotent than the landsmen believed. Had Mordecai and the Master been right about them all along? And yet despite what had happened, I could not credit it. With daylight there was certain to be pursuit and, if we were recaptured, another condemnation. I feared what would happen after that as much as ever. I wondered if they would rope us in the Chair together, or whether one of us would have to wait.

•  •  •

When moonlight faded into the new day, it showed a forest stretching as far as the eye could see. Not long after that, I noticed, to the west of the road, a pattern of lines within the tangle of green. While we were traveling with the gypsies we had encountered traces of the old times, before the Madness: mounds which had been houses, great masses where a town had stood. One area had stretched for several miles; it was hard to comprehend the number of people who must have lived there.

I had seen this pattern before too, and Mordecai had identified it as the relic of an orchard and pointed to fruits still growing, generations after the people who planted them had vanished.

“Over there,” I said. “Apples?”

They were small, but red and crisp and sweet. We forced a way through the brush and ate till we were full. Afterwards I flopped on a patch of grass for a rest and was awakened by Paddy shaking me.

“I wasn't asleep,” I lied. “And a minute or two will make no difference.”

“The sun's up.” She pointed. “They'll have found the Chair empty by now.”

So we trudged on. Later we came on another vestige of the past in a shattered arch that must have been part of a bridge, and then a continuous succession of humps and ridges which told us we were crossing the ruins of a town. A tangle of creepers half concealed a tilting pole, and while I was wondering what purpose it might have served, my eye picked up a dazzle of light ahead. Rain had brought about a slippage, exposing old stone. The reflection was from a window that still held glass,
for the most part unbroken: small colored panels forming a design. I remembered the ship in the window of the Master's house, and stopped to study it.

The window was in a building more than half buried; this would have been an upper section. Slabs of gray stone were shattered in places, but otherwise fitted close together. I found an opening, clearly the entrance to a badger sett, but the slippage had enlarged it and created a tunnel wide enough to admit me.

As I edged in, Paddy protested: “There's no time . . .”

I called back, hearing my voice echo, “I just want to have a look. And if anyone did come, we'd be out of sight.”

Inside it was very dark, the only light that filtered by the colored glass. I could see details more clearly from this side—there was a bearded face, an upraised hand, and a woolly lamb which strangely had a ribbon around its neck and a cross hanging from it. I supposed it must have meant something to our ancestors.

As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I
made out stone pillars and panels of crumbling wood. There was a smell of badger, but no other sign: They would be deep inside their burrow at this time. A cloud crossed the sun outside, and the light dimmed.

When it brightened again, I noticed something else: a carved wooden figure, almost life-size, of a man, the lower part buried in rubble but the upper free. He had a post behind him, and his outstretched arms were fixed to crosspieces. His chest was bare and there was a band of thorns around his head.

Paddy had followed me in. She whispered, “Who's that?” I shook my head. “Is he meant to be alive or dead?”

“Dead.” I looked at the face which looked toward the light. “No, alive.” I looked again. “I'm not sure.”

“There's writing on the wall, up there.” It was in gold letters. Paddy read out haltingly, “ ‘God so . . . loved the world . . .' I can't make out the rest.”

“What do you think it means?” I asked.

“I don't know. What could it mean? It's not what the Summoners say. But if they were wrong . . . perhaps there need not be Demons?”

•  •  •

Toward the end of the morning the road became uphill, the gradient slight at first but rapidly turning steeper. We argued about resting: I was for getting off the road, Paddy for continuing. The further we got from the town, the less chance there was of being found. I said we had surely traveled far enough, but she shook her head and we plodded on.

As the road continued to climb, the woods thinned and finally gave way to heather-covered moorland. The sun was well down from its zenith, but it was hot still. We sweated, and dust from our scuffing feet painted us white. I pointed out that Paddy's hideous black dress—she said she would never again tolerate even a single black button—was black no longer, but she wasn't amused. I felt tired but somehow lighthearted. She had been right to insist on pressing on. I had no idea where we would find shelter for the night, but we must be safe by now.

A pace or two ahead, I was aware of her stopping and looked back. She was looking back herself.

“It's them.”

Her voice was flat. Behind us the chalky ribbon of road led to the distant emerald stain of the forest; ahead it divided the emptiness of the moorland to an even more distant horizon. And about a mile back, white dust rising against the blue sky signified horsemen: a dozen of them, maybe more.

“They may not have seen us,” I said. To the right there was nothing but heather, but to the left a few patches of brush. “Come on!”

She shook her head but went with my tugging hand. The first thicket was hopelessly thin, but one twenty yards beyond offered slightly better cover. Paddy had stopped, though, looking back again, and I was forced to do the same. The riders had left the road and were heading across the moor in our direction.

They were only three or four hundred yards off, shouting at the gallop. Even if I managed to get the gun out and load it, there would be no point. And these had no nest to destroy.

•  •  •

The thin whine, rising and deepening, came from far behind us. I wondered confusedly how a wind could get up so fast on a clear day. Nor could I
understand what was happening to the horsemen: Mounts were rearing, voices crying not in triumph but in alarm. A couple of riders fell; others put up their arms, shielding their eyes.

I turned and was forced to cover my own. A huge thing of fire, shapeless behind a coruscation of shimmering gold, was coming down on us. I remembered Andy: “sweeping out of the sky in a fiery chariot. . . .” The Demons had not waited for Ramsay's men to get us. They had come for us themselves.

Something detached from the golden glare, arcing across the sky to burst between us and the panic-stricken horsemen. While I looked they started to blur at the edges, as did heather and road, and the sky itself. My mind wavered with my vision, and I lost hold on both.

I
N MY DREAM I WAS
in the kitchen on Old Isle, shelling peas. I could not have been more than three or four years old, because I was sitting on one of the ladder-back chairs and had to reach a foot down to touch the floor. There was a smell of baking, and Mother Ryan was making pastry on the marble-topped table: gathering up dough, powdering it with flour, and rolling it flat again. I was shelling peas from tightly packed pods into a basin, scrupulously eating just one out of every pod.

And yet after all we were not in the kitchen but
out of doors, with the sun warm on my bare arms and grass under my feet instead of tiles. Tiger, the bull terrier who died when I was four or five, scattered glistening droplets as he shook himself dry from the sea. I could hear Andy somewhere, singing a song about a soldier. But Mother Ryan was still rolling pastry, and I was still shelling peas.

When Mordecai came across the grass toward us I was not surprised, but I was embarrassed. He had the shotgun beneath his arm and said something about going after pheasant. I knew there were no pheasants on the island, but, more important, going with him would mean abandoning the pea-shelling. I looked at Mother Ryan and she looked back, and I did not know what to do.

That was when the Demons swooped out of the sky, one menacing her and a second Mordecai. Somehow it was I now who had the gun, but I could not make up my mind which Demon to fire at first. And Antonia was there as well—and Paddy. Other Demons were threatening them.