Once (39 page)

Despite all that was happening and despite his terror, Thom still had time to note how stunningly beautiful she was in the shadowy and perhaps muting candlelight (for some reason, reflections from the faeries did not touch her), more beautiful than he had first realized. She stood as a silent siren in her rough chalk pentagram, exotically and erotically alluring - but deadly. He blinked as if to break a spell cast between them.

And as he did so, her eyes opened. They were confused, switching this way and that, finally coming to rest on him and the invalid he held in his arms. Her face changed. It became ugly in its loathing. Her crimson lips corrupted to a sneer, her black eyes blazed with a passion whose genesis was hate. The hand bearing the dagger moved away from her breasts. Towards Thom.

He readied himself. He gently lowered his grandfather on to the bed and, remaining half-sitting, turned back to Nell and her vicious gaze. The potion he had drunk in the stairway appeared to have worn off, for he was close to exhaustion once more. Maybe it was the terrible dread in his heart that had had time to wear down the magic, or maybe it was because continual horror inevitably debilitated the soul itself. Whatever the answer, and whatever his condition, he was not going to give in to this monster. She would have to kill him first to get to his grandfather. As she had tried to kill him once before by causing his stroke with her magic witchcraft.

But that was the moment when something else happened. Something extraordinary.

FROM NIGHTMARES

THEY CAME from the darkness. And they came as if to claim her. For their ragged nebulous arms reached out to her alone.

At first, Nell was not aware. Her eyes still burned with black-hearted hatred, and her gaze was still fixed on Thom. But she frowned when Thom was distracted by something behind her and because of the undoubted fright in his expression, she knew it was no trick. And then, she stiffened.

The hate left her lovely yet dangerous eyes, to be replaced by alarm. She spun around. She cried out.

They were formed from all the things that had hidden in the murk, grossly misshapen entities that amalgamated to create more substantial configurations, a gathering that had found form through Nell Quick’s own incautious and misguided practice of the Black Arts. Through her vain callings. Through her recklessness.

And they had risen from the depths to discover shape and substance in vengeful caricatures of ancient witches.

These were the true hellhagges.

These were the sorceresses of old writings, destroyers and malefactors all, furies each and everyone. Never themselves of human breed, they could only exist in human dreams and legends, reviled by the worthy, revered by the wicked.

They were Nell Quick’s evil externalized, beckoned from places adjacent to Hell, idolizers of everything sinful, everything cruel, everything perverted.

Followers of the Dark Lord himself.

They edged apart, a shambling movement, the gait of the very old and crooked, for they were aged and bent, their crone faces, which were only half-concealed by great hoods like the monk-figures before them, rutted and wizened, their sored withered skin grey and unappealing. The more they shuffled forward, the more plain in image they became, ancient hags of diabolism, whose scabby countenances somehow told of eternal misery and depravity. Although their figures were not solid - they were amorphous, subtly shifting in pose and the blackness that had birthed them sometimes imposed itself through their garb - they seemed as real as any person in the room, and their stink was far worse than the chamber’s general malodour, which even the furious wind was unable to dispel.

Nell cringed before them, even though they were what she aspired to be. These grim creatures were both her superior and her goal. But she had not yet understood that corruption of the soul would always lead to the eventual degeneration of the flesh.

Their wicked eyes gleamed as their semicircle around Nell drew close.

She looked about her wildly. This was not right, not how it should be! Why did she feel threatened by them? Why did

they look at her that way? Why did they grin, why did they mock? She did not want those scaly and leprous hands to touch her, did not want to be drawn into them! She threw the black dagger, and they absorbed its metal. She screamed and they chuckled and drew ever nearer.

Nell’s back was turned to him, so Thom could not see her face. But he could imagine the horror there. She was retreating from the creeping hags and soon her legs were against the end of the bed. She still clutched the piece of paper that he suddenly guessed was his grandfather’s last Will and Testament, presumably handwritten by Hartgrove from Sir Russell’s dictation, and he briefly wondered if she had brought it here to gloat in front of the dying invalid. Her other hand was stretched out before her to ward off the advancing coven and for a moment - it was a very short moment - he almost felt sorry for her. This was her nightmare come into being and she could not control it, just as she could not control anything that had gone before on this hideous night. She had only meant literally to frighten Sir Russell to death, to cause another heart seizure that would be his last. It seemed that she was about to pay the price for her folly, her vanity in thinking that not only could she summon such unearthly creatures, but that she could command them also. But of course all she had invoked was the personal nightmare of each individual in the room, including her own.

For as the taunting hags crowded her, pulling at her clothes, lifting her skirt, pinching her flesh, they let the cowls fall away to their crooked shoulders, revealing countenances that were even more unfavourable than already imagined when mostly hidden from view. The skin of their scalps, from which hung scant wisps of white hair, was covered in crusting scabs and sores, their wrinkled faces full of lesions and wounds that oozed yellow pus. Their grey eyes had no lids, condemned always to see, even in sleep. Some had but a single eye, an empty, livid, red-puckered socket

evidence that the other eyeball had once been torn free; some had noses that had been eaten away as if by disease, only fragments of bone and gristle remaining. Grinning and lipless mouths were mainly toothless, merely black holes that gabbled ceaselessly in some unknown language.

They seemed pleased to see Nell (or perhaps they were just glad to be free of their own hell for a while), for they cackled gleefully as they prodded her with thin ulcerated hands, their fingernails long and curved like talons.

Their indications were evident, for between pokes and prods, they pointed at themselves, and Thom - as did Nell, herself - began to understand their garbled message.

This, in her vanity, in her blind ambition, in her wickedness, was what she was to become. Eventually, her abuse of the wiccan craft in unleashing forces that were beyond her skills and her right would lead her to the corruption of her own physical body, the inside mirrored by the outside, the price of pursuance of the occult and the powers she sought. The price that they, themselves, had paid in other lives.

Nell’s terrified but nimble brain grasped the significance of these embittered creatures that were more than mere apparitions and she started to scream. And scream. And scream…

But there was far worse to come.

Just as the hellhagges were about to overwhelm Nell with their jabbing and goading, their slaps and their pinches, lightning whitened the room and thunder shook the walls and ceiling. Every window on the west side of the room suddenly shattered inwards, millions of scintillating fragments and shards spewing into the room, an explosion of glass that blew Hugo to his knees and caused the others -even the witches - to cower. The wind roared through the new openings.

Thom threw himself over his grandfather’s prone body again, and felt the bed beneath them vibrate.

Everything was bleached. Even the lights emanating from the faeries were subjected to the greater fulguration, for it had gained entry into the rooftop room itself and it was constant for a few seconds, an intense, dazzling flood of brightness that froze everyone present into colourless sculptures. The airborne faeries became still, many of them dropping to the floor like chemically-sprayed insects. The thunder continued to reverberate and Thom clapped his hands to his ears to muffle the sound.

And even as the light flickered away and the thunder’s roar diminished, the coven of hellhagges turned away from Nell Quick to look as one towards the open terrace door, for they had sensed the presence even before it had revealed itself.

The wind suddenly dropped, although the darkness itself continued to swirl like a dense mist. No longer dominated by the other light, the brilliance of the faeries nevertheless dimmed, became soft, insubstantial. The flames of the many candles also dulled, the glow becoming weak, ineffectual. Shiny glass littering the floor became lustreless.

It was Jennet who screamed, a spare sound, but one of absolute despair.

And the faeries began wailing, a feeble cacophony of dread.

The old crones, all in disordered shape but dark in robe and aura, raised their gnarled hands to their disfigured faces, shielding their lidless eyes from the being that filled the doorway across the room. Some turned away and howled and whimpered, while others beseeched the new interloper, hands reaching out towards it, then snatched back as if burnt, short shrieks coming from the crones’s toothless mouths.

Nell, her body half-crouched, wary of her tormentors, slowly turned her head towards the door.

Thom followed her gaze.

As yet it had no formal arrangement. It was pale in the darkness that flowed around and into it, merely snatches of form that suggested, but only suggested, a figure. It was of average height - unless the parts that were suggested rather than made visible were required to knit together to make the whole - and appeared, so far, to have human form; that is, suggested eventual human form, for it was too scattered and too ill defined at that moment to tell. And of all the noxious smells wafting around the room, this was the most foul, for it clogged the nostrils and caused the throat to constrict. It was a stench not of this realm.

The hellhagges stepped back from their intended victim, leaving Nell standing alone in the inverted star-shape. They set up a low moaning as they shrank before the visitor, leaning away with cruel-nailed hands raised in dramatic gesture. The faeries, their beacons no longer bright, gathered against the far wall, close to Jennet and Rigwit, who clutched at each other (the elf held aloft in Jennet’s arms). Darkness seemed to pulse around the mutable vision as it entered the room, gliding rather than walking.

It moved towards Nell Quick, pale and spectral parts of a whole that might resemble human form when assembled -no, not assembled, for the proportions now seemed correct; it was just that the swirling darkness interfered with the overall shape, concealing elements so that those visible appeared adrift - and the closer it drew, so the fluid bulk that was the coven backed away. Thom could see their shapes in the gloaming, unsightly visages that would forever haunt him, long, claw-nailed hands waving in the air above the mass, and he could hear the reverential terror in their howls and moans. He sensed a kind of fear-struck awe in them.

The as yet unformed entity stopped before Nell, the darkness around it like a ruffled cloak caught by the wind. And indeed, the wind had returned so that the tiny flames

around the room sputtered and leaned, the shadows ever-moving, the smells whisked away but others taking their place.

Thom could see Nell’s profile and strangely her face was in rapture. There was a luminous shining in her dark eyes as she regarded the blurred vision that remained unmoving in front of her. Her breasts heaved and her breath came in short, sharp gasps; perspiration beaded her brow and trickled down her cheeks like tears. Her teeth were bared, her scarlet lips drawn back from them; her body trembled. To Thom, it looked as if she were in some kind of paroxysm -or even an orgasmic trance.

But the unclear figure finally began to take on a more stable and defined form. Features drifted through. A limb, thin, white, blurred at its edges. The chest, again thin, scarcely muscled, but a man’s chest. That is, it resembled a man’s chest, for this thing could not possibly be human. The stomach and waist became more solid, for they had already been present as a variable lightness in the dusky mists. The rest emerged - or semi-emerged; they were not yet complete, nor binding, their arrangement remained insecure and vignetted - together, the naked legs, the rest of the second arm, the genitalia - a man’s genitalia that conformed to any other man’s, neither overdeveloped, nor undersized, merely an ordinary penis over an ordinary scrotum - except there was no pubic hair. The feet, the shoulders, the hands were all vague and ambiguous, shimmering softly.

Then, last of all, the head began to appear.

‘Thom, look away I’

Jennet’s voice cut through the sound of the wind that had now gentled to a breeze and the howls that had risen to a roar.

‘Don’tlookatit, don’tlookatit!’ came Rigwit’s screeched warning.

But the assembling visage held a mesmeric fascination for him. As it did for Nell Quick also, for she regarded it with anticipation, her breasts still heaving, her lips open and wet, her eyes lit by some inner fire.

The slow transfiguration continued.

Thunder cracked overhead as if it were splitting the heavens, and in the instant flare of light he saw that the form had grown and the pale flesh had become dark and leathery. It held up its scaly arms as if to take Nell in its embrace, and all the while its features were forming. The misshapen bunch that was the hellhagges shrieked in adoration and wretchedness. The faerefolkis flooded back to the open book that lay on the floor, many of them plummeting before they made it, their lights burned out, their tiny, woeful cries lost in the jabber of their fleeing companions.

Even the staccato lightning could not banish the darkness entirely and there were now a multitude of other vaporous creatures skulking in the shades, raw-looking things that could only be demons, cohorts of the ghastly manifestation that towered over the woman inside the pentagram. The candles at each point of the five-cornered star snuffled out, but others around the room retained their dim glow which was as nothing against the blinding whiteness of the lightning’s stammering flare. This time it did not die away, but stayed, an awful strobing glare that half-revealed beings that could only have arrived from some sinister and bizarre source.

But then Nell screamed, a sound so full of hysteria that Thom could only wonder at the state of her mind. The thing before her had a face and - something hurled itself at Thom, knocking him over on the bed.

Jennet smothered him with her own body as the lightning finally stopped and the thunder rolled off into the distance. Her small hands covered his eyes.

‘You mustn’t look! You mustn’t see its face!’ she cried. ‘To see the Diabolus is to invite him into your soul!’

Thom tried to rise, but she pushed him back again so that he lay alongside his grandfather. Something clung to his legs, adding its weight, and he knew it was Rigwit.

‘But Nell…’ Thom’s words were lost in the wind that had returned in full force. ‘We’ve got to help her!’

‘It’s already too late,’ Jennet murmured close to his ear, sadness and pity for the foolish woman whose dubious ambitions had led to this confrontation in her voice. ‘She belongs to him now.’

Jennet took her hands from Thom’s eyes and he blinked them open, pushing himself upright as he did so, unable to control the impulse, stubbornly curious to see the Diabolus for himself.