The Murdstone Trilogy (4 page)

She turned away and then turned back.

‘The ones with blue jackets tend to be better than the others,’ she said.

An hour later Philip was nursing the Ford back up unto the Moor. On the passenger seat were: Volumes I and III of
The Alchemist’s Daughter
; Part One of
Dragon Summoner; The Sword of Nemesis IV
; Parts Seven and Nine of
The Firedrake’s Pestle
and
Dark Origin: The Prequel
. Perched on top of the gaudily coloured heap was a copy of Slothrop’s
A Short History of Dartmoor Funerals,
which he had taken out on the grounds that he would need some light relief.

Back in the safety of Downside, he piled the meaty volumes onto the table below the window. He then carried a stepladder and a torch upstairs and climbed into the low attic. He brushed thick dust and dried droppings from cardboard boxes that had lain undisturbed for almost a decade. Towards the bottom of the third one, under a stratum of his A-Level essays, he found a copy of
The Hobbit
. The edges of its pages were as brown as the rind
on smoked bacon. He carried it downstairs and added it to the heap along with a new A4 notepad, Minerva’s scrawlings and two pencils. To fortify himself, he prepared and ate three rounds of Marmite on toast. He stood at the window, drinking a large mug of tea and smoking a roll-up. Then he turned away from the springtide glory of the moor, lowered himself onto his chair, and began to read.

Two days later he had acquired the hollow-eyed and unravelled appearance of a man who has stumbled away from the horrors of a medieval battlefield.

Rethimnon
? Philip was fairly sure that it was a holiday resort in Greece. Or Turkey. Xanthos, was it? Crete? Definitely not Welsh, though.

Oh, God.

‘Bollocks,’ Philip cried, and dropped
Dark Origin: The Prequel
onto the heap of broke-backed books that lay at his feet. He buried his face in his hands and allowed himself a sob. After a minute or so he delved once more into his deepest resources and took up Volume I of
The Dread Palimpsest
. It was as thick as a tombstone and almost as heavy. The map on the frontispiece looked suspiciously like the Isle of Wight.

Fifteen minutes later he was drooped on one of the stools – cunningly wrought from ancient tractor seats – at the bar of the Gelder’s Rest.

‘Pint of the usual, please, Denis.’

Denis was new and young and from Birmingham; his speech consisted almost exclusively of interrogatives.

‘Got a new guest beer in? Fiston’s Dark Entropy? Bit like Newcastle Brown, but with a nice taste? Hoppy, hint of burnt toffee? Put some lead in your pencil?’

‘Ah, no thanks, Denis. Just the usual. Feel a bit frail
today, to be honest. I probably ought to have something to eat.’

‘We’ve got the liver and kumquats on special?’ Denis asked.

Something in Philip’s ascending colon murmured a gnomic warning. ‘Sounds lovely, Denis. But I think I need simple fare today? The Ploughman’s Lunch, maybe?’

Denis’s intonation was infectious.

‘The Crispy Chinese Pancake Ploughman’s? The Spicy Thai Crabcake Ploughman’s?’

‘Um. Can I just have a cheese one? Oh, and Denis? Hold the pickled onion?’

Denis took himself off to the kitchen, looking peevish, while Philip took an exploratory sip of his beer and glanced cautiously over each shoulder to see if any dangerous conversationalists were lurking.

The two Ancients, Leon and Edgar, were sitting in their usual place below the dartboard. The curdled crowns of their pints of Guinness were aligned exactly halfway down their glasses as if they used a spirit level to coordinate the progress of their drinking. Their communication was entirely telepathic, but just occasionally one of them would say ‘Yep’, and then the other would shake his head in reluctant agreement. At this late lunchtime hour, the only other people in the bar were two women wearing cropped grey hair and complex walking boots; their heads were close together over a map. Philip relaxed. The Worm of Desperation eased its grip.

After his third pint, Denis persuaded him to switch to the Dark Entropy.

When Philip left the Gelder’s Rest at ten minutes to four he was as drunk as a boiled owl. He made his way homeward, tacking skilfully between obstacles that only he, in his magickal condition, could see. Now and again he startled passers-by with sudden loud exclamations such as ‘Yes!’ and ‘Hah!’. On Dag Lane, he was enchanted by the hawthorn blossom and paused to watch it tilt and shift in the still afternoon air like the lace on a bride’s bum. Despite some gaps in his consciousness, he found himself, eventually, approaching his cottage. The green and ochre swathes of moorland opened up ahead and to the left of him. At the gateway in the stone wall he stood and conducted the landscape as if it were swelling and rapturous music.

But when he reached his own gate, at the very instant he put his hand on it, his good spirits fled. Something dark passed over his heart like a hideous shadow on an ocean floor. He could not bring himself to go into his house. His sanctuary had been possessed by necromancers and warlocks and shadowfaxers and alchemists and bloody dorcs and writers who were allergic to full bloody stops; he couldn’t face them. He hiccupped, and it brought up a sour gas. The Dark Entropy was repeating on him.

So he turned away and trudged unsteadily towards the moor. He survived the perils of the cattle-grid, then took the path to his right because it led up to level walking, and he didn’t like the feel of his legs. There was May blossom up here too, spread like a snowy quilt on its long bed of thorns; but he had lost interest in it. High above
him, a dogfight was taking place between a buzzard and a squadron of rooks, but he did not lift his head. A cuckoo called; it sounded like derision.

He steadied himself and belched, then propelled himself into the blurred overlaps of the landscape.

As stone circles go, the Wringers are not especially thrilling. That hasn’t stopped them being draped in legend; on Dartmoor, you pile three rocks in a heap and there’ll be a legend doing the rounds in less than a fortnight. They say, for example, that the Wringers can never be counted; that no matter how many times you try you end up with a different number. There are fourteen altogether, although one of them has fallen in towards the centre. According to local lore, this, the dawn-facing Altar Stone, is where dreadful things used to be done to virgins, should any be available. In fact, it was toppled in 1763 by a local farmer trying to steal it for a barn lintel.

The stones are all about a metre wide. They vary in height from just over two metres down to a stumpy 120 centimetres or so, although it is hard to keep track of them because they change places on certain nights.

The Wringers are sometimes called The Devil’s Clock, Old Nick’s Bedpan or Old Horny’s Freezer. It is said that fresh meat will never go off if it is exposed to the new moon from inside the circle, which might account for the pork-pie gastroenteritis epidemic that racked Flemworthy’s population in 1913. The Wringers have the power to cure rickets, ringworm, scrofula, gout, nail
fungus, stammering, baldness in women, heresy and wind. And also impotence, which perhaps explains why there is always a condom or two lying about.

A strange thing about the Wringers is that although you’d swear they were in the middle of a great stretch of level ground, you never see them until you’re almost up to them. And on this spring afternoon they took Philip by surprise again, although he was glad to see them. He needed something to lean on.

He felt bad now. He had suddenly put on lots of weight, and there was that numbness at the top of his skull that would later turn into a lobster-shaped headache. The air had thickened, and he was sweating. He relieved himself against Long Betty, the fourth or perhaps fifth monolith clockwise from the Altar Stone. Then he subsided onto the grass with his back against Growly’s Thumb. Very slowly he rolled a cigarette. When he told his hand to lift it to his lips nothing happened because he was unconscious.

The voice spoke and the hand wrote at exactly the same pace, but Philip knew that they did not belong to the same person. The voice was ancient, and cracked all the way to the heart. The hand that guided the racing pen was not old. It showed no wrinkles, veins, scars or hair. The skin was light with a texture like coarse soap. The fingers were longish, narrow, with pale blue nails. The writing was in a language he didn’t know, but understood perfectly. It consisted mainly of flowing diagonal strokes alternating with patterns of dots – never more than five – inside either circles or rhomboids. The ink continued to form itself into characters after the pen had moved on.

A pig’s arse to the Incantatory Preface.

This second voice cut in so brusquely that Philip was almost pitched headfirst out of dreamland. It was both light and hoarse, like the voice of a child suffering from mild laryngitis. At the same moment, the penmanship
changed: the flowing diagonals became fast slashes, the elaborate circles and rhomboids were reduced to quick wedges, dashes and curls. The ink writhed on the paper, trying to keep up.

The poor old darkler will never know what I’m writing anyturn. Long as he hears nibscratch he’ll just keep droning on. All Doom and Gloom it’ll be. Which is square enough, the fluking state we’re in. The fluking state he’s in. Beard-ends full of bits from the floor, and a clump of bleddy moss growing under his lip. His hatstrings dangle in his posset when I can get him to feed, and when I tell him so he just sighs and shakes his head like a fly-naggled goat. He arsebleats like there’s no tomorrow, never mind my sensitive Greme nosehole. Sometimes he’ll sleep two days or more at a stretch, only waking to use his foulpot (which I have to empty, and me a Full Clerk). When he’s awake, it’s gripe and bleddy groan about being stuck here in what he calls ‘Subterranean Exile’ living like a tunnel-fumbler. Comes natural to me, of course. And when I urge him on to cheerfulness, he gets the growls on and tells me I have to learn the Higher Resignation and accept that the Powers have changed their allegiance. And when I say a pig’s arse to all that he’ll put an Ache on me, which I hate, and call me a stubborn Greme like all Gremes. Well, maybe I am and maybe we are.

The pen raced on; behind it the inkage jostled itself into position.

Maybe that’s why there’s still some of us left. He blames hisself, is what it is. Broods on Ifs like they were
eggs. If he had expunged Morl from the College when he whiffed what he was up to. If he had entrusted Cadrel with the Four Devices of the Amulet. If he’d twigged the shapeshifter Mellwax. Iffing hisself round in a circle till he meets hisself coming back. Does no bleddy good. Ifs is thorns, as my old Dame used to say.

So if I let him tell it we’ll never get to the end. He’ll be all Digressions Major and Digressions Minor and Reversed buggering Rhetoric and Footnotes and Pendicles like in the Ledgers and we’ll never get at the meat of the matter. And it’s maybe we don’t have time enough. Morl’s Swelts are everywhere, even here in Farrin. I’ve clocked them overhead, and I can’t be sure the Library Seal will hold, not if they call in bleddy occulators. Listen to him. Still mumbling away in the Old Language. That Preface goes on for seventeen bleddy sheets. Why bother, I asked him, once. I got an Ache for my pains.

The pen paused and the ink caught up, but the voice continued; and in the depths of his coma Philip understood that it was addressing
him
.

Now then. What you need is a Layout. Can’t know what happens less you know where you is, as the old Greme saying goes. We’ll project.

Had Philip been awake, he’d have screamed. He seemed to rise, as if in a rocket-propelled transparent elevator, through rock strata and thick veins of earth, past the mouths of labyrinthine tunnels and burrows, past boulder-grasping roots of mighty trees. Pocket’s voice came with him.

This is a Greme trick. Even Pellus can’t do this. It naggles him, though he’s too hoity to admit it. Right, here we be.

Philip experienced a silent bursting forth, and then he passed through a band of glow and came to rest hovering above a vast, impossibly beautiful landscape. It was lit by gently shifting beams of multi-coloured light, as though the sun shone through slowly-rotating filters. For a dreadful moment, he thought he might be having a religious experience.

The Realm
, Pocket said matter-of-factly.
Or, as we are supposed to call it nowadays, the bleddy Thraldom of Morl.

It began to scroll towards Philip and pass slowly and silently beneath him. Farrin was a high plateau of conical hummocks and copses of trees that cast orange shadows. It was webbed with tracks, although there was no obvious sign of dwelling places, merely scatterings of jumbled stone. The walls of the plateau dropped away, shrinking into long ridges of rock like the spinal plates of buried reptiles. These stretched into a harsh desert where blue-shadowed dunes were continuously transformed by winds that Philip could not feel.

A range of mountains came into view, rearing up almost vertically from the sands and sweeping in a great arc towards a dark sea far off to Philip’s right. These crags were grey, but where their surfaces had been broken by collapse or quarrying they showed interiors of buttery yellow. The higher peaks were lightly dusted with what looked like snow, although it was white for only brief periods of time. Among the far foothills, light danced
on the surface of a lake; close to its far shore a black castellated island cast a green shadow on the water.