The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (20 page)

My work for Jasper on the Cathedral had just finished when I heard that he had been sacked from Playtronics. I immediately rang him up and e-mailed him, but there was no response. Eventually, one bright Saturday morning, I went round to see him. He answered the door immediately, but seemed reluctant to let me in when he saw me. I think he had been expecting Plimson.

Instead of letting me into his flat in the normal way by simply turning and allowing me to pass through, he retreated, walking backwards so that I was facing him the whole time. He was perhaps even paler and more emaciated than usual, but what struck me most were his eyes. They seemed to be focused on some distant point beyond me, even when he appeared to be looking into my face. I told him how sorry I was that he had left Playtronics and that they shouldn’t have let him go. He responded to what I said with only half a mind. He claimed he wasn’t bothered about being sacked from Playtronics because he had been going to resign anyway, but I did not believe him. I saw resentment behind the distracted, wandering eyes.

Very soon I began to suspect that he was desperate for me to go. This became obvious when my glance strayed towards a glass table on which stood an ornament that I had not seen before. Perhaps ‘ornament’ is not quite the right word. It was a little statuette about four inches high standing on a polished cube of polished black basalt. The statuette, of blackened bronze, its slightly rough texture suggesting great age, was of a hooded and cloaked figure crouching or squatting. The figure was humanoid, stunted in growth and hump-backed. One long-fingered hand emerged from the folds of its cloak to grasp its knee, but the most striking aspect of it was the head. The hood put all its features in shadow, but the posture was quite eloquent enough. It was thrust forward from the body in an intensely watchful way. One did not need to see anything of the features to know that it was looking, and looking hard.

When Jasper saw that I had noticed the statuette, he started to bundle me unceremoniously out of the flat, muttering something vague about having a lot to do. I did not resist. I was glad to go, because the whole experience of visiting him had disturbed me. On leaving the flat I spent quite some time just walking the streets before I was calm enough to gather my thoughts. I had reached the terrace in front of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank of the Thames before I could begin to articulate what had worried me. It was a bright September day and the sun glittered on the choppy, tawny waters of the great river.

The brilliance of the light made me remember Jasper’s flat. The living room had white walls; it had a huge window facing north east; the sun had been shining. Yet all the lights were on in the flat and it was still quite dark. The light was somehow dull and, as I remembered, there were curious and inexplicable shadows in the corners of the room. The impression was of sombreness where there ought not to have been light.

There was another thing that disturbed me. The statuette of the crouching figure was very like something I had seen before. One of the images Jasper had sent me when we were working on the Black Cathedral was an old engraving of just such a hooded creature. I remember the engraving had a name scrawled under it in antique script: Asmodeus. The statuette was an exact realisation of that engraving. I knew that because I had turned the engraving into a 3D computer graphic.

I tried to dismiss Jasper from my mind by telling myself that he was taking drugs, or had wrapped himself up with that disgusting Plimson man and there was nothing to be done for him. He was lost. But I couldn’t stop being concerned. Several times I tried to contact him again without success. Having done my best to keep in touch, I tried to forget him; but conscience has a nasty habit of not allowing you merely to do enough; you have to do more than enough to satisfy it; you have to go right over the top.

One morning, a week after my last face-to-face meeting with Jasper, I was in the Playtronics building having a ‘creative session’. Actually a group of us were thinking of ways we could improve an old game so that we could bring out a new edition of it. There was no doubt about it: the firm had lost its edge since Jasper had left. Sam Prentice’s personal assistant came into the room and asked if I could see him urgently. She looked troubled, and I wondered if this meant that my days at Playtronics were numbered. Sam’s status in the firm meant that he could cause trouble, and I sensed that he liked me as little as I liked him. He had all the egoism of Jasper but without any of the genius.

Apart from a conference room where our creative session had been taking place, the main office is all open plan, so there is no knocking on doors or anything, and the great advantage is that you can often spy out what sort of mood the person you’re going to see is in. I managed to get a look at Sam in this way without his seeing me. His part of the office was partly hidden by a screen but his face was in full view, though sideways on. He looked thoughtful, puzzled but not potentially hostile. Then he saw me and beckoned me over.

Sam had ginger hair and went in for brown leather and designer spectacles. His booted feet were on his desk. The man behind the pose was difficult to make out. He cultivated an energetic no-nonsense approach which he put into practice by addressing me as soon as I was within earshot.

‘I’ve just had something delivered to me in the post,’ he said. ‘It came anonymously. Do you know anything about it?’ It was such a bizarre question that I simply looked at him in astonishment. ‘I’m not accusing you; I just want to know. You being on the artistic side, you might have seen this before. Have you?’ He walked over and took something out of a cardboard box. It was Jasper’s statuette of the crouching figure.

‘What the hell is it?’

The reason why I don’t tell lies is that I never believe I can get away with it, so I simply said: ‘I think it’s Asmodeus.’ Sam looked at me as if I had given him a very stupid answer. I explained and there was a pause.

‘Jasper,’ he said at last. ‘I might have known. Well, if you see your friend Jasper you can tell him from me that I am not impressed. He can’t play head games with me. This is what I think of his rubbish.’ So saying, he picked up the statuette and dropped it into the waste paper bin. As he did so I saw a sudden look of pain pass over his face. It seemed to me that he had let the object go a fraction before he meant to. ‘Fucking thing,’ he said, waving me away. As I left him he was nursing under one arm the hand which had dropped the statuette.

In the lunch hour when Sam was out of the office I went to look for the statuette in his bin. I can’t explain why. When I looked in the bin, Asmodeus was gone, and it was nowhere in his office.

What happened next I have from various colleagues at Playtronics, because I was away at a computer graphics conference which, like most conferences, was one tenth useful gossip, and nine tenths useless boredom. Apparently, Sam’s behaviour became increasingly erratic and irascible. He nearly got into serious trouble with the police for attacking a young beggar who had taken up residence in a cardboard box not far from the office. The beggar was a thin boy who often wore the hood of his anorak up and would crouch in doorways holding out his long emaciated hand for coins. Sam had to apologise profusely and pay him quite a lot of money to stop the prosecution going ahead. According to Sam he had mistaken the boy for someone who was following him. Everyone thought this was just paranoia, except for Julie (his personal assistant). This was because of something she had seen the day before Sam’s attack on the beggar.

That evening Sam had decided to go home early, leaving Julie to sort out the notes of a meeting he had just attended. Julie was in his section of office on the third floor and had wandered to the window to watch Sam leave the building. She liked to do her work alone and needed to be sure Sam would not suddenly come back and surprise her. From the third-floor window she saw him open the great glass doors of the office building and step into the little piazza outside. As he did so, he glanced anxiously from left to right, once, twice, three times, then his eyes scanned slowly round the piazza. Julie told me that his posture—slightly hunched, head thrust forward—had that aggressive-defensive look of a cat whose territory has been invaded by a fellow feline. Having done this, he seemed satisfied and began to stride purposefully across the piazza.

Just before he disappeared round a corner Julie saw something detach itself from the dark recess of a building opposite her. The way she described the ‘something’ was ‘half way between a shadow and a living thing’, then, to cover herself, she added: ‘I know that sounds stupid.’ She said it was like a dwarf or a small child in black with a hood over its head. It might have been crawling except it moved too fast for that. ‘It sort of scuttled, slightly sideways, like a crab,’ she said. ‘And I knew it was following Sam. Don’t ask me why. I just knew.’

After the beggar incident, Sam seemed reluctant to be left alone. He took to going with colleagues to a wine bar after work. The trouble was, he didn’t add much to the jollity: he just sat there drinking. The rest got tired of this, so they used to try to tease him out of his gloom. Their efforts were unsuccessful until one night when they started to needle him about telling the police he was being followed. One bright idiot said he remembered a bit of poetry about it that he had learnt at school:

Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round, walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.

The effect was immediate, Sam went berserk and started to attack the bright idiot, screaming gibberish at the top of his voice. It took all the other five colleagues there to restrain him and get him out of the wine bar. The following day Sam rang in to say he was sick and the day after that his cleaner found Sam lying dead in the bath. He had cut his throat with a kitchen knife and the water was red with his own blood. The police took it to be a straight case of suicide, but were puzzled by the fact that his body was covered back and front with a strange series of parallel scratches, as if from the long nails of a hand.

When I heard these stories on my return from the conference, I tried to get in touch with Jasper, but again with no success. I went to his flat, rang the bell and got no reply. Then one evening the phone rang and someone at the other end announced herself as Jasper’s sister. (She was unknown to me because Jasper had never given anything away about his background.) She said that she had been trying to contact her brother but having no luck. Apparently I was the only person Jasper had ever mentioned to her as being a friend. I was moved and saddened because I had never felt very much for Jasper except detached admiration. The sister, whose name was Jenny, had a set of keys to his flat. Would I meet her there, and go into the flat with her, just in case . . . ?

Half an hour later Jenny and I solemnly shook hands at the door of Jasper’s flat. I would have recognised her instantly as a relative of Jasper’s. She had the same dark hair, closely cropped, and the same narrow, interesting, not-quite-beautiful face. I detected the same nervous energy too, but more focused, less frantic. Jenny was an osteopath.

We went into the flat and turned the lights on. Once again, I had the sensation that the place was darker than it ought to have been. It was also cold, with the deadening, slightly musty chill of a place which has not been occupied for some time. Jasper was not there. The unspoken fear of finding his body proved to be groundless, but this only deepened the mystery. The place was in perfect order. When we searched the bedroom there were no signs that he had packed and left. I went into the adjoining bathroom. His shaver was on charge and his toothbrush stood at ease in its glass tumbler. Suddenly Jenny said from the bedroom: ‘My God, what’s that?’

I came out of the bathroom and saw her pointing at a little chest of drawers in the corner. On it was the statuette of Asmodeus. Instinctively I told her not to touch it. She looked at me curiously and said she had no intention of doing so, but why . . . ? I said nothing and we went back into the living room.

There, on a long shelf, above a radiator was an object we were sure had not been there when we entered the flat. It was a candlestick in which a black candle with a black wick had been placed. The candlestick itself seemed to be made of some greyish lustreless metal, possibly pewter. It was in the form of a column with a heavy pedestal base and a capital composed of four grinning imps. I realised with a shock that its design was one which I had made for a computer graphic to Jasper’s specifications. Around the base in Roman capitals were incised the words FANVM EIVS QVI SPECTAT IN CALIGINE. Translated this meant: ‘The Temple of He who Watches in Darkness’. I knew that because Jasper had told me in an email. But the word ‘caligo’, according to Jasper, means more than simply darkness, it means more a thick black fog, or a deep shadow. I picked up the candlestick. Though it was not much more than a foot in height and its main body two inches in diameter it was so heavy I could barely lift it. Its surface was smooth, slippery and uncannily cold.

I dropped it. The thing was a horror, so we left it lying on the floor. We then began a more systematic search of the flat for some message or clue as to Jasper’s whereabouts. On the huge screen above his PC was a post-it note with some writing on it in green biro. It read: ‘You must get rid of Asmodeus. Avoid touching it if at all possible. For Christ’s sake don’t try to trace me.’

Not knowing what to do next, I switched on the computer. Jasper had a large plasma screen the size of a dressing table mirror which totally absorbed my entire field of vision, and it was operated by a state-of-the-art touch-screen control system. As soon as the machine booted up I began to look for clues. My eye was attracted to an unusual desktop icon. It was a sinister little black gothic arch under which the word ‘BlackCath’ was written. I touched the icon and found I had entered a version of Jasper’s
Know Your Enemy!
game. I was then presented with a large virtual simulation of Jasper himself, requesting that a preferred enemy be chosen. Hearing his voice speak out loud in that lonely room was an unnerving experience, especially as I was unable to locate any speakers. Jasper’s hand trailed across a selection of enemies, each one represented by the iconic reproduction of someone’s head. One further icon allowed the player to programme in a new enemy of his or her choice.