Maxie’s Demon (16 page)

Before very long the farm buildings vanished, and the ragged walls of fence and hedgerow took their places, with the occasional
stooping mass of a tree; but never a leaf rustled in the heavy air. I rode nervously. I hadn’t lost my seat over the years, but I hadn’t used the muscles much either, those I’d ever had. And I kept expecting a stumble in the blackness, or a sudden sweeping tree branch. Or maybe just one of those all-purpose soggy thuds from up front.

It didn’t come, though. I began hearing other things; bubbles,
gurgles, and a soft, sinister whispering of water, and beneath it all a dull, earthy pulse, almost a feeling, not a sound. Yet if anything the junction seemed to be getting louder. I peered ahead, but the furthest I could see was Dee – and suddenly he threw up his hand for a halt. He needn’t have. I thought I’d ridden into a brick wall. My horse checked and whinnied, I choked and swayed in the
saddle. The piggeries had nothing on this.

‘Aye,
a rare stink!’ grinned Kelley from behind me, dabbing at his nose with a cloth. ‘A few breaths, though, and ’twill pass.’

‘I’ve a better idea,’ I wheezed. ‘Why don’t we? Pass, I mean?’

‘Because this, I fear, is our road,’ intoned Dee mildly, lowering himself from the saddle with practised ease. ‘Somewhat of a privation, true. But so strange a
passage is not achieved lightly.
Per stercoraria in cloaca
.’

‘What is?’
I demanded, peering into the dark and fumbling with my long-dead Latin.
Through
– something –
into the
—something else. What was ahead didn’t look archaic. Painfully modern, in fact, all blocky concrete outlines straight at the edges, but with curved things in the centre, and something moving above them, sweeping by with a
trickling hiss. Swinging arms, above circular concrete tanks.

‘Wait a bloody minute!’ I squawked. ‘
This
is your way back? This is a frigging sewage farm!’

Gdunk gdunk gdunk
went the pulse, chugging the brown tides of civilisation through pipes and filters and bacterial beds beneath our feet, leaving nothing but the aroma to curl around the steel-shuttered buildings with their tall ventilator
pipes. Even for a place like this it was a bit fierce, ammonia and methane and every little ester that goes with them. The worst of it seemed to be coasting happily down the breeze from straight ahead. Right where Dee was leading his horse.

There was a door ajar there all right. Nothing but blackness behind it, but you could practically see the open air curling up and turning yellow. The stink
sidled out with a confiding leer, like a strip-club tout.

‘No – I said
wait!
You’re not going – you’re not getting me—’

Nobody was paying
me a blind bit of notice. The aeration tanks with their endlessly circling trickle arms looked like stiffened clocks, as if around here time really had bogged down.

I swung out of the saddle just in time to avoid hitting the lintel, as my beast nosed in after
Dee’s. I wrapped the reins around my hand, but I couldn’t pull its head around. The building was a decrepit pile of decaying concrete, held up mostly by habit and sprouting little sprigs of weed from every crack; the door was jammed open, the lock long ago bent and vandalised. The
gdunking
sound echoed around the rust-streaked roof. There wasn’t any floor; a darkened ramp sloped off into the depths.

‘We must make haste!’ said Dee earnestly. ‘Foul airs gather here!’

‘Oh really? I hadn’t noticed.’

He blinked at me. ‘Truly? Yours must be a hardy age.’ He patted my shoulder again. ‘But this goes beyond mere hardihood. To linger is to risk suffocation. Lead your mount, and swiftly.’

I was about to express
my opinion of the whole idea, but Dee was already away, and my horse was following his,
as horses do – only with my hand still tangled in its reins. The brute pulled me off my feet, and one went over the edge of the uneven ramp, crumbling bits off the crummy concrete. Behind me Kelley’s mount was crowding in, and in the dark nobody saw my plight. I couldn’t do a damn thing, not even scream – that would have meant drawing a deep breath. So, hopping, wheezing and gibbering, I was shanghaied
down into the dark.

The horseshoes echoed on the concrete, and I prayed they wouldn’t strike a spark on the mouldy stuff; the methane here would go up like a bomb, and we’d come down over half the Home Counties in a shower of—

Extremely distressing proportions.

Above all I didn’t want to hear a splash. That was exactly what I heard, from about three feet ahead. I whimpered.

‘Be not so hasty,
master Maxie!’ Kelley hissed. ‘Here we must mount up! Good brother, there’s need of a spark!’

‘Naught easier!’ said Dee’s voice, before I could scream. Please God, not a tinderbox or something—’

The glow wasn’t like that. Too gradual, too faint, too cool. The first thing I saw by it was Dee, holding his staff, with its silver cap in his other hand; and on the top it had concealed glowed a globe
of glass, with something pearly at its heart. The light had the same tinge, and as Dee raised the staff it grew stronger. The ramp ended in a concrete shelf, stained and slimy, and beyond it a greasy brownish tide lapped and bubbled. His horse stood ankle-deep and dejected at its edge, with Dee holding his long legs up in their stirrups to avoid trailing them in the muck.

‘Thus
it was we traced
the sources of power!’ he said affably. ‘A simple device, but driven by magical power. Light flows through All, even when it is light our eyes cannot detect. It is only necessary to attune it to the limits of our sight by such a device. And when it begins to operate, and gives forth even a faint glow, there the borderlands of the magical realms begin. But where, as here, it shines still brighter
– why, then we are within the purlieus of the Great Wheel itself!’

I shivered violently. The old bastard was pretty bright himself. He’d made a Spiral detector. And here we were, not just on the edge but right up to our necks in it. Among other things.

‘Now,’ he said decisively, ‘let us be on our road!’

I let out a light laugh that somehow turned into a hysterical cackle. ‘Into the
sewers?
This
is your frigging strange and mystical path?’

The old man nodded. ‘Strange as’t may seem, it is.’

‘Hey c’mon! There’s not much mystery where these lead – look what’s coming the other way!’

Dee shook his head chidingly. ‘Only be patient, young sir, and you will see. True, it is an ignoble road, through filth to the light. Yet is not that the human condition, even from birth? Why then should
this be so very different?’

He had me there.
With my lifestyle I ought to feel right at home. Most of my adult life I’d spent in the gutter. Now I was right down the drain. Natural, wasn’t it?

The horses were tossing their manes and snorting. ‘Me too, chum,’ I told mine softly. ‘But you didn’t leave me much choice, either. And the more I get to know about this Spiral place—’

The sooner I should
get shot of it. I mounted up, praying I wouldn’t slip. Dee’s horse was already moving, hooves skidding slightly in whatever awful slush lay under the turbid surface. Another thought struck me. If daft old Dee had stumbled on some way to alter the wavelength of, say, cosmic radiation to that of visible light; if there were ways to muck around with physics like that … It was a blood-chilling idea.
That was entropy to hell and gone, just for starters. What else could follow? That bastard Fisher hadn’t told me the half of it. Anything, cubed.

Including, for all I knew, coming galloping up through the Piccadilly Circus comfort stations.

We were moving upstream, unlike everything else, along the concrete channel. Here and there, though, older-looking brick archways were opening – in better
condition, most of them, though crumbly and fanged with grey nitre. The oldest yet was stoneflagged, its channel deeply eroded, though only a thin yellowish dribble ran into the main. Dee calmly stuck out his hand, and we turned the horses into it. We rode in the channel bed, silently, swaying and cringing to avoid the little stalactites that reached down, or dribbled icy drops down our necks. The
air was a little clearer, which wasn’t saying much, and neither did we. The hooves plashed and echoed, as did Kelley’s rasping cough, but there was no other sound in the sewer behind.

Now
and again other openings flanked the old sewer, some of them looking even older, and they blew draughts cold or fetid out at us as we passed. Occasionally one would belch and spout a flood of water or a thick
stream of sludge. Into one of these, no different from the rest to my eye, Dee directed us, and almost at once across an open space with a vaulted roof into another, flanked by the remains of rusted old railings and no improvement at all. We rode quietly, my horse following Dee’s as he jogged easily onward, sitting very straight and unafraid, never once looking to one side or the other, utterly
confident in his road. I became aware of Kelley moving up beside me.

‘You’re fallen quiet.’

‘Christ, what d’you expect from me? Shafts of wit? Among the wafts of sh—’

He chuckled. ‘Never fear!’ His teeth glinted dully. ‘He knows where he’s bound, he’ll not lead us awry. Not by a step.’

I glared at him. ‘Fi—Somebody I spoke to said you had to be a tremendous navigator to get through the Spiral.
Instinctive.’

‘The Spiral?’ Kelley chortled softly. ‘I’ve heard this realm called the Wheel, like yon inn sign, but who knows? Spiral may be apt, or more so. The Doctor’ll batten to that.’

There was a sudden scrabbling from behind us, and a faint, distant chittering, high-pitched. Kelley whirled around with his hand to his swordhilt, then subsided with a cheek-puffing sigh of relief.

‘What
was that, then? Economy-size rats?’

‘No.’

My hair
bristled. ‘What d’you mean, no? What was it, then?’

‘How should I know? Or want to?’ He leant closer. Down here you’d think his breath would be gilding the lily, but it still registered. ‘Many paths cross here. Most of men; some not. Few of them need concern us, unless we should stray into their midst. Which we shall not.’ He jerked his head
at Dee. ‘See how surely he threads his way. He could do’t as well in utter lightlessness, where a common man’d trip at the first step. Times are, I think his very sureness be his strength. Sure, because he’s no idea he could fail.’

We jogged uneasily along, turning first this way, then that, through a network of nauseating fluxes that never seemed to find an end. Only the tunnels changed, from
brick to concrete to stone and back again, with occasional startling variants. Victorian coloured tiles, ludicrously bright to be stashed away down here – or did they hold little picnic parties to admire them, that sanitation-minded breed?

What looked like seamless ceramic dominated one brief stretch, with far away the faint whining hum of massive engines and, much nearer, passing at speed, a
clatter that suggested something with six feet. Heavy metallic feet, and fast. I told myself it could be cleaning machinery, but then I’ve always been a lying little sod.

Round another
bend and, whoops, splishety-splash into a sort of broad storm drain, vast and echoing with a roof of rounded arches; Roman or medieval, maybe. Always it changed, sometimes at every turn. Only the stinking stream
beneath our feet stayed the same – the lowest common denominator of man.

And the time that passed, or didn’t; and the oppressive silence. It felt like something solid, an unforgiving weight squeezing in on your eardrums, an immense mass of blackness poised over your head. Almost in self-defence we began to talk. Mostly it was Kelley and myself, he eagerly going over and over my experiences, about
the twenty-first century, any and every shred of knowledge I could give him. He had charm, despite the buzzard breath, and he used it. Dee didn’t bother, but occasionally he would drop a question into the conversation with a kind of genial condescension, like an uncle listening to his favourite nephews chattering. That was how they made you feel, those questions. They told me a lot about him.

I knew the type, only too well. I could even have been one myself, I had quite a few of the qualifications. They didn’t live in ivory towers; they
were
ivory towers, tall pieces sweeping across the chessboard, ignoring the halting pawns and acknowledging only their own likenesses. Not the stereotype upper-class twit; they were often bursting with brains and talent. But practically from their cradle
everyone had told them that; or worse, let them assume it. They’d just gone gliding along their effortless rails, into anything from the Civil Service to business, academic life, even the media, and considered it perfectly natural. So they thought just that little bit the worse of everyone who had to
try
.

Oh, they
could be philanthropists, idealists, even; they could be kind.
Terribly
kind. But
always from the heights to the depths, across a great divide. It was a strength, that isolation, often a frightening one; it could make them good and kind in ways ordinary people never managed. But it could also make them amazingly naïve, especially in human matters. And when they were, there were others down here waiting.

I knew. They’d been waiting for me.

Dee had just that kind of unconscious
arrogance. Talking to angels! He would bloody well believe he could do that – or at least that he was entitled to, and never mind why anyone else couldn’t. He’d be the last one to think of it as overambitious, as hubris; he probably thought of himself as humble. He probably was humble – at least until you pricked his basic assumptions.

Prison visitors and other intellectual do-gooders of one
kind or another, always ready to pronounce on equality of opportunity and social justice over tea and cucumber sandwiches in the back garden – only if the cucumber wasn’t sliced thin enough, God help the au pair. To do them justice, they’d invite a paroled axe murderer along, if only he could talk. They’d invite me, provided I sounded proley enough; my real accent would never have done.

Talk
was what they respected, I found. They assumed, consciously or unconsciously, that nobody could talk properly without a couple of letters after their name. So when they picked up some streetwise villain with a good line in patter and a bit of second-hand erudition, they decided he was a rough-diamond intellectual
manqué,
and fell all over him. They were so secure in their own rightness that they
couldn’t really appreciate just how wrong others could be. I knew one upper-crust female barrister who’d hopped into bed with a string of no-nos – well, me included – and finally married one appalling thug with a body count into two figures, though they’d only got him for one. A fallen angel, she’d called him.