Maxie’s Demon (37 page)

Greying.
Sod. They’d probably all be still in bed, and I’d have to wait for my drink.
Still, maybe I could catch Poppy in her nightdress, or better still out of it. I sauntered down the path, hopping over puddles and kicking stones like the eight-year-old I probably am. After everything I’d been through, the place almost looked like home. I strolled into the village, hearing the cocks crow and smiling benignly at the scrubby watchdogs that yapped at me from their tethers.

What
did all-purpose Ye Oldes have for breakfast? Bread, of course; eggs; bacon; sausages, surely. Maybe not coffee or tea, though; but I could face beer. Mulled, with spices, to take the chill off. I’d earned it, after the things I’d been through, after the first awful night I’d taken that path. Maybe Fisher would be there, and I could tell him just what I thought of him and his advice. You could see
the path from here, at the crossroads ahead, winding up the hill there, where those idiots were waving …

Oh.

Right at the top of the path, at the brow of the hill, lounging there as if they’d been waiting.

Oh,
shit
.

The crossroads lay between me and the pub. At the speed they moved, they could buzz down it in a moment and stuff me before I’d taken two steps across.

One of the
women cupped
her hands to her mouth and shouted.
‘Going somewhere, Maxie?’

I blinked. The voice was hers in pitch, but the accent was that of the jolly black guy. And he’d made almost the same movement. I was hypnotised, rat by snake; only this rat was more than commonly resentful. ‘
You!
’ I screamed back. ‘We exorcised you bastards! We cut you off! You can’t track me, you can’t tempt me any more! Where’d
you bloody bubble up from?’

‘Not the same sewer as you,
señor!’
This time it was the Oriental guy; only the timbre was female, and the words sounded like the Spanish woman.

‘Don’t get rid of us that easy, Maxie!’ called the blond man mockingly. ‘Cut off – huh! Why sweat it? We brought you here, we found you here! All we had to do was drift back’n just hang around. We knew we’d get you, sooner
or later. Sooner it is, too. Gotcha now – and we’re not gonna lose you, not this time, not nohow. So why not make it easier and come talk like a civilised citizen?’

He’d started the speech; but the Oriental took it over somewhere, seamlessly, and it finished in the black guy’s mouth, smiling as ever. I was beginning to understand at last, and it chilled my blood horribly. ‘Civilised? I talk to
citizens with names! I don’t even know yours! I don’t know a damn thing about you!’

They weren’t even bothering, any more. They just laughed – the same laugh, from mouth to mouth and back again, and sounding bigger, somehow, than all of them put together. ‘Go on!’ I shouted furiously across the dawn breeze. ‘You think you’ve got me? Then no reason you shouldn’t tell me your names, show me yourselves
– all of you! Who’re the hidden ones? Who’s the real power behind you, the real face? Which of you was first?’

‘First?’
The laugh was huge and horrible. It seemed to shake the sleeping thatches and draw them in towards it, sucking them inward. A burst of baby squalling arose from behind one banging shutter. ‘There is no first! There was no first! Why should I remember, why should I know or care?
I know only the now, and the next! There is only
Me!
’

‘Then
what d’you want me for?’ I screamed, into the windy echoes. Leaves whirled up around my head, dust stung my face. ‘Why won’t you bloody leave me alone?’

The laugher was cold. ‘Because you have tasted Our power, Maxie! Because We know you will not resist it, not in the end!’

‘You bloody wish! But why me? Out of all the bloody Spiral,
why chase me?
’

That did it. I understood then, even before they said anything; and they seemed to sense it, because they laughed that laugh again. ‘Because you are not of the Spiral, Maxie! Because
We
lured you out of the Core! To be Our bridge, Maxie, Our conduit! Our vessel, Our vehicle into a world that’s unprepared for Us, that cannot guard against Us! And through you,
in
you, We’ll grab life
by the throat – not just the Spiral’s shifting shadow life, but to the Core!’

‘You
bastards
!’ I was vaguely aware of the hot tears streaking my cheeks. ‘You utter frigging bastards! You want to … take me over, don’t you? To ride me! To
steal
me! Like a bloody car!’

And didn’t that raise a laugh. ‘You have stolen yourself, Maxie! If you’ll not come to Us, We’ll come down upon you! You drank of
Our wine –
you’re Ours for the taking!’

It was more
like an animal roar – a bestial one, certainly. The figures on the hillcrest seemed to lean together, straining like the landscape, as if I was watching it in a deforming foil mirror. It was nothing at all like computer animation, like morphing; nothing nice or fluid. It was a sucking, straining distortion that drew faces and limbs together
into a vast, inchoate vortex, a whirling horror in which, for an instant, an individual feature would still be seen, stretched to a thread of familiar shape or colour. The bellow thundered across the dawning sky, and the poplars bent.

‘Come to me, Maxie. My name is
Legion
!’

Out of the vortex the face took shape in a sudden bulging thrust, the nightmare face as I’d seen it, but solid now, no
longer made of writhing human outlines – or at least you couldn’t see them. And it was vast. It was a wolf’s face, a bat’s, a man’s, a hairy predatory vision of every animal fear, lifting hot and steaming above the hillcrest. Through the boiling mists beneath its body rose, manlike, hulking, yet hung about with the same reeking, matted fur. And above its shoulders, vast as the hill itself, black wings
hunched upward to blot out the dawn.

I wasn’t hanging about to criticise. Religious I’m not, but that shape straight out of the universal subconscious struck directly down from eyes to legs, with the barest bypass to my brain. I was already running as its great arm reached out, racing the black waterfall of shadow the clawed hand sent sweeping ahead of it, down the hill to the crossroads.

Run,
or – no, not die. I’d guessed what I had to fear down there, and it wasn’t death, nor hell neither. But the terror of it sang down my legs and turned my tendons to red-hot wires, my lungs straining, my heart drumming. As I ran I felt a sullen tremor in the earth, one of those awful footfalls I remembered so clearly, and the sky flared green at my back. The crossroads opened out before me – and
blackness swallowed them, the last spilled dregs of the sinking night. I screamed, I suppose; I took the crossing running, and as my foot touched it I leaped. It was like leaping an open freezer; a deadly chill breathed around me, sickening my stomach, riming my hair.

Then the stony path slapped my worn shoe soles, and I was through. Shadow was all it was, the shadow of the reaching arm and not
its substance. Vast and slow the thing itself reached out for me, cable sinews tautening one claw-tipped finger; but I was through, away and running for the Wheel. Running madly, screaming for Poppy, running like a man possessed – or one about to be.

I fell, more than once, rolled in the dust and hardly felt it, springing up again and shrieking as the shadow touched the walls and trees around
the sleeping houses. Once, twice the ground shuddered at one of those fearful footfalls, slower than before but massively weightier, a mass no obstacle could stop. It felt like about a century before I reached the pub wall and swung around it. I scrambled over the low fence without even breaking stride. The door was shut, locked and barred maybe, but I was damn near ready to run right through it,
toon-style.

I didn’t have
to. It opened as I thrashed through the clawing rosebushes and on to the lawn. It opened, and there was Poppy herself in cap and shawl and long white nightgown, candleholder in one hand and a gnarly broom upheld in the other. I flung myself at her feet, unable to run another stride. Why, I didn’t know; what could she do or anyone, against that monstrosity? But this was
all the safety I could think of. I babbled, I screamed, I don’t know what sense I made; but I didn’t need to.

The arm of blackness lay all across the village now. The thing hung vast in the sky, its shell of ghastly green glare rippling against the greyness. The arm that cast the shadow reached down towards the straining thatches slowly, effortfully, as if the air was turning thick and sticky
as syrup, but horribly unstoppable. Towards us it stretched, it strained; but it was so vast it would reach us all the same, and soon. The nearer it reached, though, the less clearly I saw it, somehow. I thought my eyes were going out of focus, but it was the thing itself, the fringes of its ratty fur blurring and shimmering, edged with prismatic rainbows as if I saw it through a cheap lens.

I knelt at Poppy’s feet, my breath wheezing into tortured lungs, too weak even to clutch her legs, and she reached down and put a protective arm about my shoulders. Her very steadiness made me aware how I was shaking. I knew why. I understood only too well what that thing was.

What had Loew guessed? Men who’d made themselves into the image of demons. He’d been right, up to a point. Not demons.
A
demon.

A blend. A
merging, a composite monster made up of its own victims, drawn in by the very strength it gave them. Until drawing on that strength made them more and more a part of it, until all but the shell of their individual selves was lost, dissolved in the greater self-image. An Arcimboldo portrait, Faust and Mephistopheles in one.

Even from that vast height those narrow eyes were fixed
on me, flaring red, piercing, hungry – a hunger I could feel, a hunger for the individuality I had and it hadn’t, for all its compounded power, the thirst of minds whose own lives had long ago been lost and dissolved, to live again through another. Not just the few I’d seen, the eight or so; those shadowy figures behind them had only been a glimpse, all that could be seen of the ones that had
gone before. A symbol almost, of a vast queue of victims winding off into obscurity.

And it would have me soon like all the rest, walk in my shape, but with all that vast, invisible crowd trailing along after me like the segmented body of some enormous worm. Like all the rest, only worse, because through me it could walk in the Core, in the world I knew, a wild possibility reaching in from the
shifting chaos that was the Spiral, tearing open the gates of probability to let loose all hell. A demon unleashed, to violate every law there was, natural or otherwise – my demon, Maxie’s Demon.

Through me, for as long as I lasted. Until I was hollowed out and burnt up, until I was so broken to the insanely fragmented wills behind me that I no longer had a will of my own. Until I joined the
head of that queue, that horrendous body, and went snaking away with my fellow shadows to rope in some other poor wretch, on the hooks of his own weakness.

The wolf jaws
parted, and between the stained sabre teeth the long tongue lolled and slavered, dripping foam that boiled into nothingness. The reaching claw seemed to quiver with massive effort, as if it was hooking in the universe. The reek
from the fell grew thicker. Even the grass around me seemed to be straining upward in answer to that summoning claw.

Poppy’s wide lips set in a pout of obstinate defiance. ‘Oi! Shoo! Be off with you! Nasty great thing!’ She brandished the broom indignantly.

The very sight of her started me laughing helplessly. I sprang up, and the slight effort seemed to float me right off the ground in that
pull.

‘You get out of it!’ I shouted, though I could hardly breathe, and my lips slurred the words. ‘’S’not you it wants!’

‘It’s everybody, moi dear, in the end! Can’t be standing for that, now, can we?’

She was right. Suddenly I felt very strange. I was still afraid, I was bloody terrified – but I was also icy calm.

If it was going to get us anyway, suddenly it didn’t seem that important.
If it was inevitable, it didn’t matter; what mattered was how. All the more reason not to take it lying down. Or whimpering, for that matter. Maybe something like that happens to soldiers in wars. I could almost believe the sergeants in the war movies shouting, ‘What d’you wanna do – live for ever?’ Because you don’t get brave when you think like that – but you do get angry.

The monstrous
finger
stretched out to me. I stretched a couple back, and added a juicy Italian gesture for good measure. ‘You want me?’ I screamed. ‘You sure? I’ll give you bloody indigestion! A century’s worth! I’ll run you ragged!’

It sounded even limper than that, believe me. A fart in a tornado would have had more effect. But it made me feel a bit better. It would have been nice if that claw had even faltered
in its long, slow thrust, but it didn’t.

‘Get inside, Poppy!’ I repeated, hoarsely. ‘If it gets any nearer—’

The girl actually giggled. ‘Never you fret, moi dear! This ol’ place ain’t so very easy overset, oi can tell you! There’s been worse than that hereabouts in moi time and before it—’

‘Worse than
this
?’

‘Oo yes, and never yet – oh,
there
you is! We was wonderin’ what was keepin’ you,
wasn’t we, moi dear?’

Fisher.

Fisher, in a dapper green jacket and tan slacks that made me want to weep, because they were the first normal clothes I’d seen in what felt like a century, the first token of a world where things like this didn’t happen. Fisher, striding out of the door past me with only the swiftest glance, and not an ounce of fear or hesitation in his step.

Fisher, not alone.
Two women with him. Two awesome women, glowing with life, who almost made me forget the monstrous thing overhead. One dark, short-haired, sleek as an otter and as quick, with eyes that snapped and glittered in a strong-featured spearhead of a face. I knew her from the magazine, his wife, but wearing some kind of uniform now, grey, with chain mail at the shoulders, and swinging an awesome sword at
her hip.

The other, taller yet, wore a sword too, a massive, basket-hilted thing. Her blonde hair foamed like a waterfall over broad shoulders and a blunter, more sensual face, just the heavy side of pretty, but with a wry half-smile that mirrored a glint of wisdom in the eyes. Her tight, dark T-shirt and leggings, in some kind of fuzzy midnight moleskin stuff, left a lot of tanned skin bare.
Even in the shadow it glinted golden over her whipcord muscles, as if by the stored radiance of tropical suns.