The Black Tattoo (8 page)

Charlie had turned to face her.
 
His arms were coming up either side of him, and as he raised his hands toward the hovering girl his face twisted slowly into a mask of sudden and absolute fury.

Esme sank to her feet.
 
Her hands too were coming up as if to protect herself.
 
Her eyes were wide.
 
Her legs were bending as if she were pushing against some terrible weight.
 
The air in front of her seemed to be shivering — rippling.

And now, slowly, Esme's feet were beginning to slide back across the floor.

Jack stared.

Charlie leaned forward, eyes bright with rage, his fingers clawed and stiffening.
 
The weird shivering in the air around Esme's outstretched hands was spreading, turning a heavy bruise-black, stretching and folding back around her.
 
The rumbling got louder:
 
the beginnings of a grimace of pain appeared on Esme's lips, then—

"STOP!" roared Raymond.

Charlie turned, arms still outstretched—

Released, Esme dropped to the ground with a thump—

Something hot and electrical rushed past Jack, almost knocking him down.
 
Then—

Silence.

Charlie's arms dropped to his sides.
 
He was breathing hard.

"W—" said Raymond, then cleared his throat.
 
The big man looked pale and shaken.
 
"Well," he sid.
 
"That's certainly... more like it.
 
You okay, Esme?"

She nodded.
 
Lying where she'd fallen, propped up on her elbows, Esme stared up at Charlie for another moment before flippng smoothly to her feet.

"You're... obviously a lot stronger than I thought," Raymond told Charlie.
 
"I can understand what Nick saw in you."

Esme's face fell.

"Your control could use a lot of work, though," Raymond announced.
 
"And Esme'll need to put you through your paces till you learn some technique.
 
Kicking and punching," he added.
 
"Yeah, 'specially punching."
 
He smirked.
 
"You punch like a girl."

At this, Esme managed a thin smile.

Jack looked from her to Raymond and finally to his best mate, who apparently really
was
some kind of superhero.
 
He noticed a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, and it took him a moment to work out what it was.

Jack was scared, he realized:
 
scared of what was happening and scared of where it all might go.

Charlie just grinned to himself.

"So," he said.
 
"Tell me about this demon."

KNOWLEDGE AND POWER

"The Scourge isn't an easy thing to describe," said Raymond.

They'd set up the conference table again, and he, Esme, Charlie, and Jack were sitting around one end of it.
 
The afternoon sunlight was streaming in through the butterfly room's big round window, making the dust motes sparkle in the air.

"Try," said Charlie.

"It's not... physical, like you or me," said Raymond, giving Charlie a look.
 
"The Scourge doesn't have a fixed size or weight of shape.
 
It's intangible:
 
a thing of chaos and magic.
 
That's one of the reasons it's so dangerous."

The boys looked at him blankly.

"The laws of physics — gravity and so on?"
 
Raymond shook his head.
 
"They don't apply to the Scourge.
 
I've seen it be in two places at once, and it can travel big distances apparently instantly.
 
It never gets old.
 
It never gets tired, and we don't think it can be killed."

The boys' mouths started to open.

"However," Raymond went on, holding up a hand to forestall them, "it does have one important weakness.
 
It's this."

He leaned forward, putting his beefy hands on the table.

"The Scourge seems to need a host body," he said.
 
"Like a home base to come back to.
 
A person," he emphasized.
 
"Someone who'll let the demon live inside them and work its will through them."

He gave the boys a moment for what he was telling them to sink in.

"Do you mean it's... kind of like a parasite?" Jack asked.

"A little, I guess — yeah," said Raymond, nodding.
 
"One thing, though:
 
it seems like once it's got itself established in someone, the Scourge can also project itself out of them somehow.
 
It can take a piece of itself and send it out into the world — like a ghost or a double or... a shadow.
 
That part of it can go wherever the Scourge likes:
 
it can speak and find out stuff; it has physical strength and it can fight.
 
But for... certain things, the Scourge has to stay completely in its host.
 
Or... that's what I think, at any rate."

"You think?" Charlie echoed, raising his eyebrows.
 
"You mean you don't know for sure?
 
Why not?"

"Because until fourteen years ago," Raymond replied bleakly, "the Scourge had never escaped before."

Jack frowned.
 
"But... what about the Brotherhood?" he asked.

"Yeah!
 
Didn't they know anything?" asked Charlie.

Raymond sighed.

"Look," he said, "there are two things you need to know about the Brotherhood.
 
The first is that it's very old.
 
The earliest account we have is from Anglo-Saxon times, around fifteen hundred years ago, but the secret was passed down by word of mouth before then, and there's no way of knowing for how long.
 
Nick always believed the Brotherhood began much earlier:
 
centuries, even millennia earlier.
 
And as to how it began — and who it was who first imprisoned the Scourge?
 
Well...
 
He shook his head.
 
"Nobody knows."

The boys gave him a skeptical look.

"The other thing about the Brotherhood," Raymond went on, regardless, "is that it's secret — perhaps the most closely guarded secret in the world.
 
There are other groups that have powers.
 
There are other groups that use magic or have dealings with what you might call 'the supernatural' — but there's nothing else out there like the Brotherhood.
 
And no one outside this room — apart from two others who I'll come to in a moment — has the faintest idea we exist."

"Why?" asked Jack.

"Yeah," said Charlie.
 
"If the Scourge is so dangerous, why don't more people know about it?"

"Think about it," Raymond replied.
 
"The Brotherhood was founded with a single purpose:
 
to keep the Scourge imprisoned.
 
Everything we do or have done, for thousands of years, comes — or came, I guess I have to say now — down to that.
 
The order's members, right down to Nick's father, Jeremy, believed that the more people who knew about the Scourge, the more likely it would be that someone would make a mistake — that the Scourge would be released and that the Brotherhood would fail in its purpose.
 
And... well, when you think of all that's happened, who knows?"
 
Raymond's face turned sad.
 
"Maybe they were right."

"How did you get involved in all this?" Jack asked.

Raymond looked at him.
 
"Nick chose me."
 
He smiled wryly.
 
"Against his dad's wishes, I might add.
 
Nick chose us all:
 
picked us out for our different skills.
 
There was me, two sisters, Belinda and Jessica — and another feller called Felix.
 
Four disciples, one master."

"Five's not really much of a brotherhood," Charlie commented.

"Believe me," Raymond replied, "even five was a lot more than there had been.
 
By the time Nick's dad got round to telling him about the Scourge, there was no one else left who knew the secret but him.
 
When Nick announced he was going to find some new recruits, they had a row so big that they even stopped speaking to each other — right up until Jeremy's death.
 
But Nick did his best to make the Brotherhood strong again:
 
if it wasn't for Nick, none of us would be here."
 
He paused.

For a second — that was all, before Raymond's self-discipline took over — Jack had a glimpse of just how much the big man wished his old leader were there with them now.
 
Frankly, this didn't make Jack feel any better about things.

"Now, our job, as I say," Raymond went on, "was to keep the Scourge from escaping."

"Escaping from what?" asked Charlie instantly.

"A tree."

"A tree?" said Charlie, looking from Raymond to Esme incredulously.
 
"A
tree?
"

"The Scourge was imprisoned in the roots of a tree," said Esme.

"That's right," said Raymond.
 
"A big oak, it was, in..."
 
He hesitated, looking suddenly secretive.
 
"Well, you don't need to know where now."

"But this tree," said Charlie, obviously having difficulty with the concept (and Jack couldn't blame him:
 
he was too).
 
"Was there something special about it?
 
I mean, how did you actually know it had a demon inside it?"

Raymond ran a hand over his shiny bald scalp and frowned, remembering.

"Again," he said, "it's... hard to explain.
 
You could sort of... feel it."

He stopped and thought some more.

"When you were out looking after the tree," he said, "pruning or what have you, you'd sometimes catch yourself... thinking things.
 
Unless you were awake to it, you might not even've noticed you were doing it, but you'd find yourself getting... ideas."

"What ideas?"

"One time," said Raymond, "and I'm not proud of this — I caught myself thinking about the rest of the group.
 
I started thinking about magic, about how rubbish I was at it compared to Belinda and Jessica and Nick — and I found myself wondering if the others thought..." — he frowned — "
less of me
for it."

He looked up at the boys.

"That's what it does, the Scourge," he said.
 
"It manipulates you.
 
It looks all through you for weaknesses — all your little hurts and resentments — and it exploits them.
 
I think that's what happened to Felix," he added.
 
"I think that's how the Scourge escaped."

"Nope," said Charlie, making an 'over my head' gesture, "You've lost me."

"How?" asked Jack.
 
"How did it escape?"

Raymond sat back on his chair and looked into the past.

"Felix was jealous, that was his problem," he said.
 
"He always took things personally.
 
He saw coming second-best as a slur on his spirit — second in magic, in combat, in anything.
 
And when Belinda and I fell in love," he added and paused.
 
"Well, I think that's what pushed him over the edge."

"What happened?" asked Jack.

"Felix went to the tree and let the Scourge possess him," said Raymond.
 
"There was a fight:
 
the rest of us managed to force the demon out of him, and Nick recaptured it in his staff.
 
But Belinda, my wife, was..."
 
He trailed off.
 
"Well, she died.
 
Esme was only a baby at the time."

Quietly, without fuss, Esme touched Raymond's hand with one of hers.
 
Jack was looking at them, but Esme noticed, so he stared down at his lap.

"Ever since then, we've trained," said Esme, taking up the story.
 
"Every day since then I've worked and waited, perfecting my skills in case the Scourge ever escaped again.
 
And now," she added, and her amber eyes glittered, "now, my chance has come."

Jack looked at Esme — at the way she held herself, the set of her mouth and the cold hard glow of her strange amber eyes.
 
At that moment, the gulf between him and her seemed so wide as to be uncrossable.
 
What must it be like for her, living like this?
 
Really, he knew, he could have no idea.
 
To dedicate your whole life to one purpose, to spend every single day training and preparing...
 
Sometimes, in the past, Jack had imagined himself doing something similar.
 
Sometimes he'd even liked the idea.
 
Just then, however, he knew that imagining was going to be as close as he was ever going to get.
 
And to be honest, he wasn't very sorry about it.

"What about the other one?" asked Charlie suddenly.

Everyone looked at him blankly.

"The other Brotherhood person.
 
You know... what's-er-name?" Charlie snapped his fingers.
 
"Jessica?"

"Oh," said Raymond, surprised.
 
"Well, Jessica and Nick had a row."

"What about?" asked Charlie.

"After... what happened," Raymond said, "Nick had... doubts.
 
He must've felt guilty for what happened to Belinda:
 
maybe he wished he'd done like his dad had said and never brought the rest of us into this thing in the first place.
 
At any rate, he made a decision.
 
He announced he was going to find a new place to keep the Scourge:
 
another tree, but somewhere secret, where supposedly none of us would know about it.
 
Now..."