The Printer's Devil (16 page)

Well, I wonder what all that was about,
she thought.
Body in a sack: that’s
Rigoletto,
and Gilda (‘Mia figlia! Dio! Mia figlia!’
¹
);
but why? Failing to find a logical connection, she turned over and went back to sleep.

When, some hours later, she staggered out of bed bleary-eyed to make the morning coffee, she stubbed a toe on the metal case containing her photographic gear in the hall. This did not improve her temper, and she hopped around cursing for a while; but at least it had woken her up.

In the kitchen she stood on one leg to massage the bruised toe while waiting for the kettle to boil, staring absently out of the window and reviewing the previous day’s strangeness. It was not like Alan to fall asleep at his desk, or forget to move her gear, or to be so oddly furtive about what was on his word-processor.

Kim would have liked to ask him a number of questions, but she had a client at half past nine, which meant she had to be at the studio by nine.

When she got there, the studio was freezing cold, and rolls of paper surrounded the fax. Kim listened to messages on the answering machine, none of which were of great import, turned on the fan-heater to reduce the chill in the barn-like room—a somewhat optimistic gesture—and examined the faxes, muttering ‘Why—is—it—so—bloody—cold?’ The temperature seemed lower inside than it was out, which was ridiculous.

‘Client’ll freeze to death,’ she worried, searching for coffee. Presently the door-buzzer sounded and she found herself greeting not only her own client, the art director from the advertising agency, but the agency’s client as well.

Kim’s heart sank. Clients on shoots were always bad news. Knowing not a thing about lighting, film or camera angles, they would nonetheless flap around poking their noses into everything, changing their minds every five minutes, and panicking when they saw the Polaroids, which they always imagined showed accurate colour however many times they were assured to the contrary.

Mickey made an ‘I’m-sorry’ face from behind the client, and Kim gritted her teeth and prepared herself to be agreeable.

‘The model’s booked for ten,’ she told them. ‘Now a lot of this is going to be down to the lighting’ - Mickey grimaced - ‘and you won’t be able to see very much till I’ve done some Polaroids. “Weird but not sinister”, is the brief?’ This to the client, who nodded.

‘The software package is called MicroMagic,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought new samples of everything, and a little PC - that’s new, too.’ Kim raised an eyebrow at Mickey: she wasn’t used to efficient clients. She was not sanguine that he would continue to impress.

‘You got a visual for me to look at?’

‘Oh, yah,’ replied Mickey, unzipping her folio case. Her roughs showed a wizard in a tall hat and spangled gown with his hands spread in typical pose, except that beneath them a PC had been substituted for a crystal ball.
‘MicroMagic,’
said the ad.
‘Better than a pact with the devil.’
Kim felt the invasion of a shudder down her back.

‘Jesus, it’s cold in here,’ observed Mickey. ‘You a closet Eskimo or something?’

‘No, I think the heating’s up the Swanee,’ Kim said. ‘Cluster round the fan-heater, guys. Soon warm up when we’ve got some lighting on set. You want this on one-twenty, Mickey?’

‘Yah, ‘s only going in press, don’t need five-fours. Don’t go any smaller, though.’

It took most of the day to set up the shot: the lighting was complicated, Kim was something of a perfectionist, and the client blotted his copybook pretty soon and nit-picked constantly thereafter. Both Kim and Mickey breathed deep sighs of relief when he departed at four o’clock; so did the model. After that, without the interruptions, they finished within the hour and Kim sent the films to the lab for overnight processing.

‘Want a beer?’ she asked Mickey after the model, too, had taken his leave.

‘Sure, why not. Thank God that old fart-arse Clive buggered off early. Why is this place so cold? I’ve been freezing all day. It’s like
Tales from the
friggin’
Crypt.’
Mickey blew out, and her breath stood in the air like mist. ‘Look at that. That ain’t natural, in September.’

Kim rubbed at her own arms, feeling the lizard-skin of goosebumps through her sweatshirt. ‘It is strange. Here - at least the beer ought to be cold.’

‘Frozen solid, more like. Thanks. When d’you expect the trannies back from the lab?’

‘Oh, by ten, I expect. I’ll get them on a bike as soon as.’

Despite the cold, Kim felt a strange reluctance to go home when Mickey had left the studio, but it was too chilly to potter for very long. She broke down the set and packed up as slowly as she could, and was on the point of locking the strongroom door when something made her stop.

One instant, there was nothing. In the next, she was aware of threat - a threat as tangible as a mugger with a knife, but more. It was an
over-reaching
threat which filled the air, a palpable presence, and Kim felt icy sweat on her face, cold as if she were about to be sick.

She backed to the wall, putting it behind her for safety, and looked round. The familiar shape of the studio - lights, stands, backgrounds, milk crates and debris - all was as she had left it. The high ceiling was in shadow. But what she felt was present, not behind anything, but somehow in everything.

This is damn stupid,
thought Kim. And yet it wasn’t. Something was there, wherever
‘there’
was. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the presence was gone. Kim sagged against the wall. Breathing heavily in reaction, she wiped her clammy face.

He found something,
she thought.
Alan. He found something in Southwell’s tomb. Or is it that something’s found
him?
Or me? Something from the tomb?

At home the only sign of Alan was a yellow Post-it note in her office:
‘New client - Brewer Neal (brokers). Gone for brief.’
and a telephone number.

Uncharacteristically indecisive, Kim returned downstairs and spent some time in the kitchen manufacturing a sandwich of very thin bread with a very thick filling. Chewing this thoughtfully, she walked slowly upstairs again and stared at the closed door of Alan’s office, wrestling with a sense of control slipping away, of the world gone awry; as if its rules had suddenly been rewritten.

It seemed to her that the way everything worked had been subtly altered, so that now it was quite natural for Kim to go furtively searching Alan’s office - as natural as it was for him to keep secrets from her; which would never have happened in the world as it had been. Kim sensed, with a profound but unfocused dread, that something irrevocable had happened. Or was happening. Or was about to happen.

She envisaged a whole series of worlds, each diverging from a path, spreading down like a family tree, branching from paired single ancestors into the ultimately uncountable: the branches occurring where one unforeseeable possibility would prevail, or be chosen, over another.

So there was now an infinity of possible worlds, and a further infinity within each of those; and something now was different in the particular world which Kim and Alan inhabited. It had diverged from time. Deep inside, she felt an intuition of some strange evolution, a yearning, but for what she could not tell.

Pushing open Alan’s door, she would not have been in the least surprised to enter a magician’s den complete with hanging crocodile, athanor, and curled alembics. Or to meet there with someone who had not existed a moment before - or who had always existed.

Consequently the mundane scene which met her eyes, the word-processor and the fax machine, the mailing packs spread on the desk - was for a disorienting instant far stranger still. So disoriented was she, hanging as she was between possibilities, that she almost jumped ten feet when the telephone rang, and her hand hovered over the receiver for what seemed like minutes before she picked it up.

It was the photo lab.

‘Kim?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Dave, at Pix. You know those films you sent in today?’

‘Yah?’

‘There’s something dead funny about them. I’ve just got the test shots through, and either you’ve got a double exposure on ‘em or else you’ve invented some new technique we lesser mortals haven’t discovered yet.’

‘Dave, what the hell are you talking about?’

‘Can I bike these tests to you now? Then you can see for yourself.’

‘Oh God, if you must,’ said Kim.
I do hate this kind of thing,
she thought.
Riddles, puzzles, treasure-hunts. Damn it, how did this ever start?
She thought of telephoning the number Alan had left, but irritably dispelled the idea, knowing herself how annoying it was to be interrupted when with a client. Forgetting, for some reason, what it was she had been about to do, she made her way downstairs, scarcely aware that she was singing to herself:

‘Deserto sulla terra, col rio destino in guerra, e sola speme un cor... un cor al Trovator.
’

‘Alone in the world, unlucky in war,

the troubador has only one hope: his heart.’

It seemed, when she realised what it was, an ill omen. Kim grimaced, and crossed to the stereo to put on something more cheerful. But somehow there seemed to be sinister overtones in all the titles she read, and she eventually opted for silence, whistling softly through her teeth instead.

At last a leather-encased youth on a motorcycle appeared with a cardboard envelope marked PHOTOGRAPHS: DO NOT BEND.

Hurrying upstairs, she ripped off the wide brown tape which sealed the package and drew out a strip of three transparenies, which she placed on the lightbox, then pressed the switch. The fluorescent lights beneath flickered on, and Kim stared in horrified disbelief at the shots she’d taken that afternoon. Her first thought was: I’ll have to get them retouched. But on closer examination, she wasn’t sure it was possible.

Balefully lit from beneath, the ‘wizard’ crooked his bony fingers over the PC: in whose screen squatted an image which, although it was as three-dimensional as a hologram, Kim could not see clearly. She was glad of that: it gave her the impression that her own sanity was a thing to be doubted. She could be sure of a mouth, which quirked as she watched - or so she thought - into the same smile as the model’s. It revealed altogether too many teeth that were more like fangs for comfort. And eyes. Eyes expressionless as a bird’s, or a lizard’s, or a toad’s, staring into hers. Was that a hand, clawed? A horn, there? a hint of scales?

‘Bastard,’ she muttered, for no real reason, and snapped off the light. Somehow, the eyes remained, green like a cat’s in car headlights, flat and luminous. Leaning over the lightbox, Kim cursed aggressively, but found this did not relieve the strange sensations whirling and curdling inside her stomach.

She went back into Alan’s study, then, and stared dumbly at the small smoky glass lying innocently on a frayed handkerchief on the desk - innocently as a black widow in its web. Battle appeared to have been joined, though how she knew that was, in itself, another mystery. Almost as if, in this adjacent world, she had grown another sense. And the tableau before her, her own hands flanking the cloth but not touching it, and in the centre, the glass (neither of which had been there earlier) spelt out a message clear as calligraphy.

Kim looked at her veiny big hands and at the way the light and shadow lay on them and thought:
These are the hands of the person who has to fight this battle.

Her wrists looked too improbably thin and bony to support the thought.

11 : Look Not In My Eyes

‘Know that your words have won me at the last To practise magic and concealed arts.

Yet not your words only but mine own fantasy That will receive no order from my head,

But ruminates on necromantic skill.

Philosophy is odious and obscure.

Both law and physic are for petty wits.

Divinity is basest of the three,

Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vile.

’Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.’

Christopher Marlowe,
Doctor Faustus

The voice was of singular beauty, and that part of him which was now, somehow,
other
than Alan Bellman marvelled at it. It was a sound outside that other’s experience: the control of it, the subtlety of the melodies. There was so much music to be had in this strange world. So much of of everything, and all at the turn of a .switch. Light, music, water; fire, breezes, speech; like having control over all the four elements, and more.

Alan was listening to Joan Sutherland on his Walkman.
(‘Sempre libera degg’io/folleggiare di gioia in gioia... Forever free to flit from pleasure to plasure
’) He whistled the tune, almost soundlessly, experience having taught him that singing along to tapes brought odd looks from fellow-travellers. His voice was not as pure as Kim’s: it tended towards flatness on occasion. In his hands the paper, open at the cartoons, lay unregarded, even the exploits of his favourite character Modesty Blaise. But his mind seemed to seethe with power: it was a slightly uncomfortable feeling, as if his brain were too big for his skull.

Tomorrow night he would begin Debbie’s Italian lessons. Recalling this, a strangely anticipatory pleasure hovered deep within him, but his blank expression did not alter.

Still only partly anchored in reality, he folded his paper away and got off at the right station, following that sixth-sense which no commuter ever loses. At a break in the music he squeezed the ‘off’ button, and pulled the headphones down round his neck where they sat like the bronze torc worn by a Celtic chieftain. He brandished his ticket in the direction of the collector and returned it to his pocket. Finding his car, still eighty per cent on autopilot, he stared at the dashboard for several minutes before starting the ignition, as if it were an unfamiliar artefact.