Gallows at Twilight (15 page)

The Institute vaults. Now Jake remembered. The tragic sorcerer Sidney Tinsmouth had told him that the Elders kept dark witches imprisoned beneath the tower.

‘An old enemy will be released,’ Jake said, reciting the last few words from Simon’s trance. ‘Don’t tell me … No!’

‘I’m afraid so.’ Holmwood bowed his head. ‘Among the hundreds of witches the universal coven set free was a man we had scheduled for execution. Unfortunately, they took him before that sentence could be carried out. And now the Third in Command of the Crowden Coven is at large once more.’

‘No!’ Jake repeated. ‘NO!’

Fury burned through his body. He saw his mother dangling over the canal. Saw her silent scream. Saw her die all over again.

Holmwood’s words came to him as if from far away—

‘Tobias Quilp walks free.’

Bad dreams roused the witch from his slumbers. He cried out and his body shivered so much that the four-poster bed quaked beneath him. He clasped his head in his hands and buried his face in the pillow.

‘No more!’ he pleaded, his cut-glass accent ragged at its edges. ‘Please, just kill me. Let me die.’

Slowly, the horror of the past eight months began to ebb away. The witch drew his knees up to his chin and stared at his reflection in the dusty old mirror on the other side of the room. The man he saw looked nothing like the Tobias Quilp of old. True, his skin was still deathly pale and a tiny spark of cruelty continued to glint in those china blue eyes, but where was his confidence? His swagger? Where was that cold, remorseless intelligence?

‘I am broken,’ he whimpered.

‘Then
I
shall mend you.’

His old master’s voice. Deeper, perhaps, but as musical as ever.

Marcus Crowden stepped out of the shadows. Quilp could not hide his surprise. Where was the dirty rag that always covered Crowden’s face? And why were his eyes hidden behind a pair of dark glasses? These questions fell away the moment Quilp spied the wooden box in his master’s hands.

The lid rattled.

Quilp licked his lips. He held out his hands, like a child about to receive a Christmas present. Tears ran down his cheeks. Then, at the last moment, he snatched his hands away and pinned them under his arms. He looked suspiciously around the bedchamber.

‘It is a trick!’ he cried. ‘A new torment designed by the Elders! You are
not
my master!’

‘Mr Quilp, you will listen to me—’

‘No. I have told you before—I will not betray Marcus Crowden or my coven. You may torture me as much as you please.’

‘I have not come to torture you.’

‘Have you not?’ Quilp laughed. ‘Then you are done with
this—
and
this—
and
this
?’

The witch thrust out his hands. Deep, ugly scars criss-crossed his palms, as if made by the tip of a knife or the sharp belly of a razor. He ripped open the buttons of his shirt. From chest to stomach, his flesh was a yellow and purple mass of acid-scorched skin.

‘Pull yourself together, you pathetic creature,’ the Coven Master sneered. ‘Such torture is nothing compared to my own dark imaginings. Now take the box.’

Daring to hope, Quilp stretched out his hands. He snatched the box and laid it in his lap.

‘Open it.’

His fingers quivered. He tore away the chains and flipped the lid.

‘Is it you, my pet?’ Quilp murmured.

Dull yellow eyes gleamed in the light. The thing inside the box snuffled, chuntered, howled. It reached out and gripped the sides of its prison. Slowly, painfully, the demon crawled out of the chest and into Quilp’s lap. Overjoyed, the witch rocked the demon in his arms like a baby.

‘My own dear Pinch, you’ve come back to me.’

‘I brought him back,’ the stranger said. ‘I saved you both.’

‘Who are you?’ Quilp whispered. ‘You are
not
my master.’

The beautiful face smiled. ‘You are more perceptive than the others, Mr Quilp. I will tell you the truth, but it is to go no further, you understand? Your master, Marcus Crowden, had his chance to break through the Door and release demon-kind. He had the Demontide in his hand, and do you know what he did?’

Quilp shook his head. He could feel Pinch clinging to him—was the demon afraid?

‘He let a boy defeat him. A child. I watched all this as it unfolded and I decreed that such failure should not go unpunished. And so I came into this hostile world. I poured my spirit into the body of Marcus Crowden, destroying his soul in the process. And now, with human form, I can achieve what he only dreamed of. I can bring about the Demontide.’

‘But who are you?’

The Master pinched the bridge of his dark glasses between his fingers …

‘This is who I am.’

… and slid them from his face.

A pair of blood-soaked eyes, without white or iris or pupil, stared back at Quilp.

‘Demon Father,’ the witch breathed.

‘It is our time now, Mr Quilp,’ the Demon Father nodded. ‘The Age of Man is passing. Soon it will be a memory; a story told only around the campfires of the dark creatures. The Age of Demon and Witch is at hand. I have chosen you, faithful Tobias, to stand by my side as we enter this new dawn. Will you serve me as my most trusted adviser?’

‘Of course, but what of Esther?’

‘Esther?’

‘The Second in Command of the Crowden Coven. Esther Inglethorpe. She should be your first choice.’

‘Ah yes, I had forgotten about Mother Inglethorpe.’ The demon slipped the glasses back onto his nose. ‘I am sorry to have to tell you this, Tobias, but your lover and mentor is dead. Killed during the battle to open the Door.’

Quilp had endured such pain these last few months that he did not believe he could feel any more. He was wrong. The news that Esther had been murdered cut him to the heart. He felt the first stirrings of dark magic at his fingertips.

‘Who killed her?’

‘Dr Adam Harker fired the bullet, but the one truly responsible? His son, Jacob. You remember him, don’t you? The child you failed to kill. The boy who defeated your master and wiped your coven from the face of the earth. The real killer of your beloved Esther. Maybe it is time, Mr Quilp, that you settled that score.’

Chapter 13

The Man with the Forked Tongue

Jake smashed his fist against a huge slab of masonry. Examining his bloodied knuckles, he muttered, ‘I’m going to kill him.’

Adam put an arm around Jake’s shoulder.

‘It’s natural to feel that way,’ he said. ‘But that’s not you talking. You could never hurt anyone.’

‘
You
were going to let me kill the Demon Father,’ Jake snapped. ‘The night I destroyed the Door, you let me take the gun.’

Scars of colour whipped into Adam’s grey cheeks.

‘That was different. That thing wasn’t human.’

‘Tobias Quilp isn’t
human
. Not after what he did to Mum. I’m going to find him and I’m going to kill him, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.’

Adam was about to argue further when Dr Holmwood cut in—

‘Even if you do find him, Jacob, you won’t be able to kill him. I’ve heard on the grapevine that your powers have faded. How can you hope to stand against Tobias Quilp when he has all the might of the Demon Father to protect him?’

‘My powers come back when I need them … Sometimes. Anyway, I don’t care.’

‘Do not be foolish,’ Holmwood said with a touch of his old authority. ‘Do you think your “original” would throw away his life so easily? No. The Witchfinder was clever, calculating. Josiah Hobarron would have a plan.’

The doctor rose to his feet.

‘Gentlemen, if you will follow me.’

Holmwood led the way into the mist. They crossed the plaza and made for the entrance to the tower, now blocked by a mountain of masonry.

‘What’s going on, Gordon?’

Holmwood didn’t answer. He took a small torch from his pocket and clamped it between his teeth. Then the doctor started to shuffle through a tiny gap in the blocks of fallen stone. Jake followed, trying not to think about the tonnes of concrete, iron, and glass balanced precariously overhead. He stumbled through into what had once been the tower’s reception area and his hand flew to his mouth. Everywhere he turned—blood. Blood on the walls, on the stairs, dappling the ceiling and lying in great pools on the floor.

‘They were here,’ Holmwood said, gesturing towards the caved-in doorway. ‘Hundreds of them. Friends and colleagues I’d known for years. We moved their bodies at first light.’

‘But you—’ Jake caught his breath. ‘You would have been their main target. How did you survive?’

‘I’ll show you.’

While Holmwood headed for the stairs, Jake looked back through the gap. There was no sign of his father.

‘Dad?’

Adam’s haggard face appeared on the other side of the rubble.

‘I can’t get through, Jake. I don’t have the strength.’

That was the first time Adam had admitted his frailty. Jake winced at his father’s words.

‘It’s OK. We won’t be long, Dr Holmwood just—’

Adam leaned into the gap. What he said next came in an urgent whisper:

‘Don’t believe everything he tells you, son. He speaks with a forked tongue.’

Jake shivered despite himself. He remembered the words of the Oracle:
You may find the cure you seek, but first you must obey the man with the forked tongue …

‘Keep your wits about you,’ Adam called.

Jake could only nod. He followed Dr Holmwood to the stairs and they began their descent into the bowels of the tower. From some distant part of the building came the crash of tumbling walls.

‘Is it safe here?’ Jake asked.

‘I should hardly think so.’ Holmwood took another cigarette from his pocket and lit up. ‘Nothing is safe any more.’

They reached the basement. A long grey corridor stretched away into darkness. At the end of the hall, Holmwood flashed his torch against a large steel door:

He swiped a keycard across a panel on the wall and the door swung back.

‘Welcome, Jacob, to the room in which you were born.’

Jake stepped inside the musty laboratory. Head reeling, he walked around in a daze. He reached out to touch one of the high-tech pieces of machinery only to flinch away at the last moment, as if shocked. This was where the great experiment of Claire and Adam Harker had been conceived. Within these four walls, Jake had been assembled from the genetic material of Josiah Hobarron, a dead man.

‘I wasn’t born here,’ Jake said. ‘This was where I was
made
.’

‘You could look at it that way, I suppose,’ Holmwood mused. ‘But I didn’t bring you here to talk about the past. You wanted to know how Dr Saxby and I survived? We locked ourselves inside this laboratory. It once housed our most precious secret—our grand Hobarron Weapon—and so it was built to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes. Not only that, but powerful magical charms protected these walls. When the universal coven descended,
this
was the only safe place in which to shelter.’

‘What about the others? You left them to die.’

‘I couldn’t save them,’ Holmwood snapped. Then, in a quieter voice, ‘There was no time … I heard their screams, Jake. I heard … ’

The old doctor sat down on the corner of a dustsheet-covered desk.

‘Whatever you think of me, you must listen to what I have to say.’ Lemon-coloured lips dragged at the cigarette. ‘The Elders of Hobarron have existed for over three hundred years, but I tell you now, we have
never
faced an enemy like this. The most evil being in creation—the father of all demons—now exists in the body of a powerful sorcerer. Unless he is stopped, he
will
use the combined magic of this universal coven to open a second Door into the demon dimension. There is only one person now who can stand against him—you.’

‘But you said yourself, my powers are weak.’

‘You will find them again.’

‘I can’t. I’ve tried.’

‘You haven’t been looking in the right place.’

Holmwood opened a drawer in the desk. He reached inside and withdrew a glass ball that shimmered green in the torchlight. At the sight of the orb, voices rang in Jake’s head: a cacophony of cries, both hideous and beautiful.

‘You’ve seen something like this before.’

‘My mum. She used a ball like that to ward off Tobias Quilp.’

‘No. Go further back. Tell me what this is.’

Jake screwed up his eyes. Tried to remember. And then it hit him—he had seen the orb in his dreams of the Witchfinder …

‘Josiah Hobarron’s witch ball.’

‘Exactly!’ Holmwood gave a serpentine grin. ‘In some of the old stories and legends of the Witchfinder
this
was the source of Josiah’s powers. Other tales tell of different objects—chalices and swords—but most agree that the witch ball at least inspired his magic. It gave fuel to the fire of his sorcery.’

‘But Quilp said that the witch ball had been lost many years ago,’ Jake argued.

‘So it was. This is just a replica. We had many such orbs made for defence purposes. Your mother used hers on the night she was killed. The real witch ball hasn’t been seen since Josiah Hobarron’s death.’