The Printer's Devil (28 page)

‘Kim—’ Alan began.

‘Wait—’ said Debbie in the same instant, her eyes wide and frightened.

‘Do you believe in magic?’ asked Kim, rounding on them.

Neither replied.

‘Believe it! It’s
real!’

‘You did that to the rain?’ Debbie said in a very small voice. ‘How? With the music?’

‘Near enough. Debbie, I can’t explain... or rather, I could, but it’s a long story. Have you got time to read something?’

Mystified, the girl nodded.

‘Wait there,’ said Kim.

Debbie looked uncertainly at Alan, but his eyes were distant, as though he had been switched off. She started to get up, but at that moment Kim returned and pushed a battered block of paper into the girl’s hands. ‘You only need to read as far as the marker,’ Kim told her.

The journal crackled as Debbie turned a page cautiously.

‘What is it?’ asked Alan, but without much interest.

‘Just a journal,’ said Kim. ‘About Roger and Ann; and other things.’

‘Ann,’ repeated Alan musingly.

Debbie started to read, and silence filled the room. Kim let her thoughts wander. Music intruded, as it always did, but gradually a kind of peace descended. There was no imminent demon, but her unfocused mind yielded nothing in its place.

She drifted.

After a time - whether minutes or hours she could not tell - the air in the room began to take on a peculiar dead quality, as though muffled from the world outside. Kim noted it only in passing, for now visions were forming in her mind’s eye: another storm, far greater than that one she had just quelled, as the ocean is greater than a tarn.

Thunderheads, black and tremendous, whirled on a wind like a hurricane. Ancient oaks whipped, bent and snapped. Rivers and seas lashed out of their proper beds, overwhelmed the land. Lightning blazed.

Kim gasped, as though it were her whom the gale buffeted; as if she flew, like an arrow, through the tempest. She tossed her hand over her brow as if to clear it of rain. Blood thundered in her head, and the world went into flux around her. She struggled like a diver in rough seas as it seemed to curdle, and then coalesce; and though she remained aware of her surroundings, she could see, clear in her mind’s eye, scenes which flew by, or which she flew by:

...a golden landscape, the rolling arable land of England’s southern counties (What fields and hedges and farms were those?) lit by a winter sun and chased with the shadows of clouds, laid out beneath her as though she stood upon a high hill. Leafless trees stuck up into the air like black scrubbing-brushes laid on their backs. As she watched, the cloud-shadows turned to blemishes, like ink poured over a watercolour drawing...

...a seascape glowing like liquid fire, its seas and inlets, islands and darkling shores, more like a cloud-

scape seen at evening, when the setting sun transformed the skies into a country you could sail to and yearn for, with all your heart. Twilight overtook it, overwhelmed it, blackened and polluted its fiery seas, quenched its light...

...soaring mountains, steep and high and cold, airless and perilous to humans. Slow-creeping, ominously cracking glaciers in their valleys went unimaginably deep, covering the secrets of thousand of years. Snows, here and there loosened by the unimaginable action of sun and thaw and wind, plummeted from pinnacles too sheer to climb, but the avalanches they began changed to deadly effect as they thundered downwards...

...The great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit,
thought Kim, and suddenly she
saw
it as a whole, as something complete and entire in itself, as an orchestra is more than a collection of instruments: something which could work magic. For an instant of epiphany, she saw not only
how
it was, but also
why
it was, and she understood everything.

Music took over, took her over entirely. To many people, music is an emotional experience. For Kim it was, as it had always been, physical. She took the music which was in her and flung it outwards, and felt it tingling all over her body: every hair stood on end, and tears came into her eyes, and the power which rose within her - or was channelled through her - was both greater and more controllable than anything that she had ever known. The hills spoke like horns; the fields’ voices were like flutes; the sea thundered like a mighty church organ; and Kim laughed out loud with the certainty of it, and the joy, and wiped out the stain on the landscape, the darkening of the skies, and the cold death of avalanche, with a sweep of glory which was music.

The storms subsided, and Kim saw a face - a face she had seen before. Not Southwell: a younger man, grey-eyed. Now, however, there were white threads in his untidy brown hair (ones which matched her own), and shadows beneath his eyes.

Who this was struck her now, as it could not before; but now she knew a part of his life - a portion of his grief. And she shared some of his troubled thought - born, as he had been, into an alien age. Perhaps it was sorrow which had aged him, for he was not so much older now than the last time she had seen him.

‘I think I understand,’ said Debbie’s voice.

Kim jerked back to her own living-room, but somehow did not lose contact: she had retained an anchor. ‘I’m - Ann, in some strange way,’ Debbie went on, ‘aren’t I? But who is Roger/Walter?’ She followed Kim’s eyes to Alan, whose gaze was still abstracted. Her face reddened. ‘Steve?’ she whispered.

Alan looked at her, and to Kim his features seemed to fuzz momentarily, as if a lens through which she was observing him had gone out of focus. Debbie clutched at her hand, unexpectedly.

Kim felt for the Victoria Cross in her pocket with the other hand, and squeezed it.

‘Roger,’ she called softly.

Have a care,
whispered a thought in her mind.
Ever remember this with our Roger: he seeks to bend you to his will. An you be certain that it is your own will and not his that you follow, you may thwart his desires. Every secret withheld from him is a weapon you may use.

There was no interim, this time. Alan simply stared across the room with alien eyes. Debbie gave a little gasp, and her grip tightened on Kim’s hand.

‘So, magus,’ said the high and hateful voice. ‘Have you decided?’

‘I have,’ said Kim.

The air seemed to tighten in the room, almost to hum.

He thinks you are avaricious for power, even as
he
is. He does not believe a man can deny it, once offered, though it mean that man must acknowledge a master.

‘And?’ said Southwell greedily.

‘Teach me the use of the power.’

Southwell rose, and Kim stifled a gasp. Now Alan was changed indeed. Changed before her eyes. Grew taller, darker. He laughed, and the laughter was like the grating of a rusty hinge. He held out a hand to Kim, a hand which was broad, black-haired, and broken-nailed.

‘My hand on’t, magus; tell me now your name.’

Tell him not, names are power.

Knowledge exploded in Kim now.
Il mio nome non sai...
she thought,
you do
not
know my name!
And a name she had read came into her mind.

She faced up to Southwell.

‘No, I will not tell you my name,’ she said, and her voice sounded strange in her own ears. ‘But I call the name of your nemesis.’ She saw uncertainty creep into the other’s eyes.

‘Beelzebul,’
Kim said softly, and gasped in shock at the blow which buffeted her as it rushed in like air into a vacuum. Her breath caught in her throat, her skin crawled. The room stank, an indescribable reek which she could hardly bear to inhale.

‘No!’ shouted Southwell, flinging up his hands.

Kim saw, with a distant revulsion, his fingers sink into his temples, and a grey pocked rottenness steal over his face. She herself was shaking all over. The power she felt now was as great as the glory of her music, but its antithesis. It was destructive, sickening and terrible. It wanted to negate, to unmake. It wanted to torture and to rend; and she knew that it would not, once having been called, be content with Roger Southwell’s essence. And now it knew her, too. Sweat poured off her, cold as melted snow, and nausea made her stomach cramp, and more than her stomach: her mind and soul shuddered with the horror of what she had called. What she had
had
to call.

Behind her, Debbie and the dog Blondie were tightly curled together. One of them was whimpering. She didn’t know when Debbie had relinquished hold of her hand.

‘I am armoured in bronze,’ whispered Kim, sinking to her knees under the paralysing force which beat down upon her. She was clutching the Victoria Cross like a talisman, so tightly that it hurt her hand, but the pain helped keep her hold on reality. ‘All here are under my protection, except the one whose name you know.’

Southwell screamed then, a raw inhuman sound which tore out of his body. She saw blood follow his fingers as he clawed at his disintegrating face, and felt herself shaking like a leaf in a storm, wanting desperately to close her eyes, yet not daring to. She saw the skull beneath the skin, and that too was crumbling: within it was only darkness, and then she did close her eyes for an instant as she swallowed nausea, only to force them open once more a moment later.

Sucked out, finally, Alan collapsed on the floor, but she could not go to him, and that was almost the worst thing of all. The presence turned its attention on Kim: the room seemed full of mist now, swirling before her

vision, catching her voice in her throat. If it had been terrifying before, now, with its full malice bent upon her and somehow recognising her in ways she did not understand and did not want to contemplate, it was unbearable. She no longer believed herself capable of motion or thought, but she still felt, when she reached for it, her strong anchor, and with it, her powers of speech.

In the face of the invisible horror which hovered in the room, Kim shouted aloud.

‘Go. Begone. Get you hence. Be banished and buried!’

Its reluctance was like claws in her innermost being: agony flared as she felt it tearing at her. Gathering all her fading strength, she focused it like a laser and she sang one line, her voice rising to a crescendo.

L
’ultima volta, addio! For the last time, farewell!’
And the presence was gone, vanished as utterly as if it had never bruised the air as if with leathery wings. Kim crawled towards Alan, still shuddering. With dread, she turned him over.

Debbie lifted a white and tear-stained face from where she had buried it in her dog’s blond fur. ‘Is he all right?’

‘Yes,’ breathed Kim in relief, feeling his side rise and fall. ‘It’s Alan. Southwell’s gone.’

‘Gone... what was that?’

‘A devil. A demon. I don’t know. Something... killing you would be too kind for it. Something out of Hell, if you believe in it.’

‘Now I do,’ said Debbie.

Alan Bellman opened his eyes. He felt as though he had been ill for a long time, but was now waking free of sickness. Frowning at Kim and Debbie Griffiths, he wondered why they were sitting on the floor.

‘You okay?’ Kim asked.

‘I think so,’ he replied. ‘What happened? Did I pass out?’

‘Sort of. Sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes,’ said Alan, considering, ‘Except - I think I’m rather hungry.’

‘He must be all right,’ exclaimed Debbie, with a nervous smile.

‘How are you at frying bacon?’ Kim asked her.

‘All right, I suppose.’

‘Let’s go, then.’

Kim helped Alan onto the sofa. He was still a little puzzled, but sank back into the cushions amenably enough. There was something different about Kim, he thought. But what was it? A powerful sense of inner strength, certainly, but that was nothing new. So what...?

His gaze lighted upon an ancient-looking, crudely bound quarto volume, and his antiquarian instincts surged up. He picked it up avidly, dating it at a glance towards the end of the seventeenth century, and began to read:

‘It is a Proverb with us in England (That Every Pavan has his Galliard) by which expression is declared, That be a man never so Wise or Learned, yet every Sage hath his moments of Folly.

Which expression is most Apt in the matter of All men, for who can declare himselffree from Folly, whether it be in the cause of Love, or Avarice, or Power over other men.’

Envoi

Dearest Jennet

I find myself, having a moment of idleness, moved to put pen to paper, and bethought me that I would write and in such wise draw nearer to you. Indeed having lately presented to your father my credentials nor being in receipt on any word of him, I am sore concerned that he may think ill on me.

Of late have been many tempestuous wind and storms, which threw down many great trees and did much mischief all England over; then in the midst of the greatest storm of all did die at Hampton-court Oliver Cromwell, and now we must all trust in better times to come, that the Puritans be no more in the ascendant.

On that very same night of the 3rd of September I myself did witness one of the most strangest and curious dreams that I ever did see. I never did have with you a deal of speech concerning my poor wife Catherine that did dye in child-bed; ’twas all moiled up with magery and such-like; and I have been witness to the summoning of spirits; and dreamt on it so.