Exeunt Demon King (3 page)

He
didn’t turn his chair to look at me this time, but just his head in
a slow and baleful movement. I was sure I heard the noise of scales
moving. “You… want to look at my records?”

“
Just out of interest.” I pointed to one volume in particular.
“Perhaps that one? That’s the year of my birth. I wonder what was
on the week I was born?”

He still
looked at me suspiciously, but I now saw it was actually jealousy.
He obviously didn’t relish others thumbing through his annals, and
who can blame him? Still, my open-faced interest seemed to sway him
and he took down the book. “When were you born?” he asked, licking
his thumb.

I gave
him a date that was not my birthday and he spent an interminable
minute paging slowly through. “Ah,” he said. “That was a funny
week.”

“
Oh?” I said, feigning innocent curiosity. “How so?”

“
We lost an act. Halfway through a season, too. Very
inconvenient.”

I gently
pressed him until he told me the tale. It seemed that a stage
magician calling himself Maleficarus the Magnificent had been
retained at that time. He was, allowing for Pensey’s
understatement, a remarkable proponent of stage illusions and
close-up magic. “Went out to China and India,” said Pensey,
“learning tricks from those fakirs and other heathens. Must have
done him some good because I’ve seen dozens of magic acts, sir, and
not one of them held a candle to Maleficarus. He spent a small
fortune getting things just the way he liked them so it was a
surprise to Mr Rumbelow, the manager back then, when one day
Maleficarus doesn’t turn up for the matinee. His digs said all his
stuff was there but nobody knew where he’d gone. The police even
dragged the river. Not a sausage. It was a shame. We’d had people
coming from two towns over to see him, had to make refunds to them
all. Very sad.” Pensey looked off into the middle distance, lost in
memory. “Working this side of the orchestra pit can make a man very
cynical. You see how the lady gets cut in half, how Peter Pan
flies, you see all the joinery, wire and armatures that makes the
magic work. But Maleficarus, he was boggling, sir. Never could
guess how he did half the things he did, not even seeing them from
the wings.” He brought himself back to the here and now, closing
the book. “He did things that fair rattled the
paradigms.”

“
Rattled the what?”

“
Paradigms, sir. Conceptual frameworks. From the Greek
para
meaning beside or
beyond and
deiknynai
meaning to know. Will that be all, sir?”

So, now I had the source of the haunt, I was sure. The date
I’d given the worthy Pensey as my birthday was actually exactly two
thousand and three hundred days before the first death. Theatricals
vanish all the time, usually on the run from debt, and not a great
deal is thought of it. I doubted that was the case here.
Maleficarus had, if you recall, spent a ‘small fortune’ on bringing
his act to the Alhambra’s stage so I doubted money was the problem.
I also had my worries about any illusionist that decides to call
himself
maleficarus
. It literally means ‘evil doer,’ but figuratively it is used
to mean ‘witch’ or ‘warlock’ as in the title of Kramer and
Sprenger’s endlessly amusing idiot’s guide to inquisition,
the
Malleus Maleficarum
. There are mysteries to be found in the Orient that are not
to be trifled with, and secrets that are protected by unforgiving
and not always human guardians. I wondered if Maleficarus had
roused something with his meddling, it had followed him here and
dealt with him. And then, for some reason, stayed. More data still
was required, much more data.

I
returned to my dressing room and considered my next move. I
remember sitting at my dressing table and looking steadily at the
mirror, my chin resting in my palm, perhaps expecting my reflection
to have a bright idea. And as I ruminated, the door opened behind
me.

There
was no drop in temperature, no feeling of unease, no warning at all
and clearly, nor was there anybody on the other side of the door. I
turned suddenly but the door stood open, the doorframe stood empty
and there was nobody visible beyond. I rose slowly, walked quietly
to the door and looked outside. There was nobody on the stair,
nobody around the star trap mechanism, no sound, no signs. It was
uncommonly quiet. Usually, there’d be somebody wandering around the
stage over my head or the cleaners clattering around the auditorium
or at the very least the skittering of the mice in the shadows.
There was no sound at all. I doubted my senses and drew in a breath
of air to test another. The basement usually had a musty smell,
dust and rodents, but it smelled of nothing. I was aware of the
coolness of the air upon my sinus and that was all. I touched my
cheek and my face felt like cloth, a blurred, indistinct sensation.
I knew, somehow knew, that my senses were being filtered through
the perceptions of another. Something not quite dead, but a long
way from alive. It was watching me, smelling me, tasting me and I
was minded of a python that I had once watched leisurely get the
measure of a rat before engulfing it and devouring it. Far from
meekly lying around while I examined it, I had become the object of
its scrutiny.

As with
demons, I have encountered two haunts in my life, Parkin, two
ghosts. One was a pathetic creature, the fag end of a tragedy. I
pitied it. But this one, this one caused my every hackle to rise.
There was a slow, conniving malevolence about its presence that
worried me, and an aching patience that worried me far more. What
wonders could the humblest craftsman perform given a thousand
years? And so what villainies could the palest malign spirit
engineer when time is nothing to it? Suddenly I knew that
Maleficarus had not accidentally brought some guardian here in his
wake. He had brought something here deliberately and paid the price
for his hubris. What plans it now had, I could not imagine.
Whatever they were, though, I appeared to be part of
them.

The door
to the prop store swung slowly open. I had little choice. Either it
wanted to show me something or it wished me harm. Even the latter
case would teach me something about it. I looked cautiously inside
but the darkness was so complete that it was almost palpable. I
tried the light switch but the ancient Bakelite clacked and rattled
uselessly under my finger, its echo loud in the silence. I have had
occasion to enter several tombs, but this place was
quieter.

I went
back upstairs to Pensey’s office and borrowed a torch, a great
practical thing sheathed in rubber that looked like it could double
as a cosh. Its batteries were due for replacement, however, and the
weak yellow light it produced did little to ease my misgivings as I
entered the store. The prop store of any theatre makes fascinating
viewing, but the catholic nature of provincial theatres make their
stores all the more varied. In a few minutes I had passed Sweeney
Todd’s rotting barber’s chair, a Chinese dragon, a plaster monolith
and a stand of French windows. There were chests and boxes galore,
rolled up knights’ pennants and a collapsing piano, Yorick’s skull
in a goldfish bowl and the Duchess of Malfi’s lover dangling from a
beam. All intriguing in their way, but none had the slightest
relevance to what I was doing. I was on the point of leaving when I
heard the door shut with a bang. I hardly had time to react before
my torch was snuffed as easily as blowing out an unguarded candle.
Abruptly, I was in the dark. Unfortunately, I was not
alone.

“
Cabal,” whispered a voice in my ear. It was gentle and
sibilant in the vowels. Human larynxes have difficulty doing
that.

“
Good afternoon,” I replied. “You would be
Maleficarus?”

“
Your path lies elsewhere, Cabal,” said the voice. I noticed
that it had not answered the question. “Do not
interfere.”

“
I seek only enlightenment.”

“
It is not here. Only death. Go now.”

Perhaps
it is a character flaw, but I hate being ordered around without
even an introduction. “Why now?” I asked. “What is to
happen?”

But there was no reply this time. My torch flickered back into
life and the door swung open. I was being dismissed. Now, this
I
know
to be a
character flaw but I refuse to accept warnings without being told
the basis of the threat. If the phantom of the Alhambra wanted me
to leave, it had chosen exactly the wrong way to go about it. I now
knew that the next act in the haunt’s little scheme would be
happening very soon and not waiting the usual lengthy pause. That
suggested that it was reaching some sort of fruition and that meant
that it was worth waiting to see, warning or no.

This version of
Mother Goose
was a Demon King’s dream. After a hefty appearance
early on to broker the deal and a shorter one a little later when
the Dame asks for the goose back and gets turned down, the king
enjoys a very hefty absence from the stage, more than long enough
to run around to the pub next door and wash away the old hopes for
a serious acting career, before making a slightly unsteady entrance
for the grand finale. This was useful to me too, as it provided a
period in which I could prowl the theatre backstage without running
into too many people who had the leisure to ask me what I was
doing. As I made my second exit from the stage that night, I made
my way to Pensey’s office. He was characteristically delighted to
see me. “Don’t get too rat-arsed and back in plenty of time for
your cue, sir.”

“
I’m not leaving the building,” I said and enjoyed his mild
surprise. “No, I was wondering about something you said about
Maleficarus the Magnificent. You said he spent a small fortune
preparing his act. What did you mean by that?”

“
Mr Maleficarus was a perfectionist, sir. He wasn’t happy with
the facilities so he paid for improvements out of his own
pocket.”

“
Sounds unusual.”

“
It’s unique, sir, at least in the history of the Alhambra. He
was right, though, we certainly didn’t have anything like that
trap.”

“
The star trap,” I said, knowing full well it must
be.

“
Yes, sir. He had some of the best stage engineers in the
country in to construct that. Wanted it to be perfect. Beautiful
craftsmanship, always worked like a charm. At least until your
predecessor got his head smashed into jam by it.” You will see that
Pensey and tact were never likely to see eye to eye.

“
But he designed it.”

“
Yes, sir.” He wrinkled his nose as if he thought I was playing
some childish trick. “How did you know that?”

“
An educated guess.” I left Pensey and walked down the steps to
the basement with as much dignity as one can muster in red tights,
cloak and artificial moustache. Oh, and those damnable horns. The
spirit gum it took to keep those in place, blast them.

I
examined the star trap closely. It was very clean, unsurprisingly.
It must have had mechanics swarming over it immediately after the
last “accident.” I had researched the previous three deaths and
they had been far less spectacular. They had all involved deaths on
stage, though, twice written into the death certificates as
strokes, once as heart failure. All three, I noted, had suffered
their collapse in the same quarter of the stage. I was prepared to
make a small wager that each of them had walked across the closed
star trap immediately before dying.

The
workings of the trap looked just as you’d imagine them; relatively
simple but with excellent workmanship. I found the contacts that
triggered the flash and smoke on stage as the platform passed a
point, adjustable to allow for variations in the passenger’s
height. That was no major discovery – I’d been measured up for the
trap myself right from the first dress rehearsal although I’d never
known how they used the information until then. I found the
panniers where sandbags were placed to counteract the actor’s
weight and launch him through the trap. I found the trigger
mechanism, which ingeniously could be set off by the actor on the
platform, a stagehand standing outside the frame of the platform
lift or even from the wings using an electrical relay. All very
clever, all very irrelevant. There had to be more to the trap than
I was seeing, but I was damned if I could find it.

I
finally spotted Maleficarus’s little secret as I examined the
collar of wood and metal that held the top of the frame rigid
immediately below the trap itself. It seemed over-engineered to my
eye and the closer I looked, the more redundant the collar
appeared. A few seconds’ work with a screwdriver allowed me to
remove the inner wooden hoop and exposed the metal band that lay
sandwiched between it and another outer wooden hoop. It appeared to
be brass, but I had my suspicions that it was a far rarer alloy. I
could not find any weld or joining mark but there were
imperfections; slight ridges that were just visible in the obtuse
light of the electric torch and to the gentlest brushing of my
fingertips. I went back to my dressing room and got some paper. I
laid the paper around the inside of the hoop and gently shaded it
with an eye pencil. Don’t look at me like that, Parkin. It’s
perfectly normal theatrical accoutrement.

A few
minutes careful work gave me a map of the ridges. They didn’t mean
anything in themselves, but I followed the strongest ridges with a
greasepaint stick and returned to my dressing room to hold the
paper up to the light, viewing it from the reverse side. You see,
the ridges were just were the metal had been pushed back by
characters being driven into the metal of the outside of the hoop,
driven in at the tip of a cold chisel. A particular type of chisel
sanctified in a process whose details have no business being
repeated in a tale for a Christmas Eve.