Gallows at Twilight (19 page)

The walls of the prison bedchamber melted away and were replaced by the hard reality of the study.

No longer master of his will, Simon felt himself turning away from Rachel and heading for the door.

‘Simon? Are you OK?’ Rachel called after him.

‘Sure. Need some air.’

‘Do you want me to come with—?’

‘No. Need some time alone.’

Still deep in conversation, Brag and Pandora parted to let him through. Simon closed the study door behind him and crossed the lounge with swift, robotic steps. He picked up the cordless phone. Little gears were turning in his mind, working the mechanism of a hidden memory. The digits flashed into his head and he dialled. After the third ring, the call was answered.

That soft, menacing, musical voice—

‘Dutiful son, what have you learned?’

Simon hesitated. He felt the weight of words crowd into his mouth. It was all he could do to hold them back for a few precious seconds. He spied Adam’s long-bladed scissors resting on the phone table—the ones the doctor used to cut articles out of psychology journals. Simon’s hand was like a dead weight but he managed to fumble and grab hold of the scissors. He would have to be quick. As soon as he opened his mouth the words would come tumbling out in a treacherous flood.

‘Speak, my son,’ the voice hissed. ‘Tell me what you know.’

He tried to drop the phone but it was as if the receiver was glued to his ear. He lifted the scissors to his mouth, felt the cool touch of steel against his lips. There would be pain soon. Horrible, burning, screaming pain. Blood would gush down his throat and he would spit the severed flesh from his mouth. He would never speak again, except in slow, slurping mumbles. It was a sacrifice he was willing to make, if it kept Jake and his friends safe.

‘What are you doing, boy? Nothing silly, I trust. You cannot fight me.’

Simon shuddered. It was now or never. He put his thumb and finger into the eyes of the scissors and opened his mouth wide. He stuck out his tongue and slipped it between the shining blades. The wet, pink tip glistened in the light. Simon closed his eyes. Tensed his fingers. One quick, brutal snap, and it would be over. Just a little courage and …

‘SPEAK!’

At the command, the scissors fell from Simon’s hands and clattered to the floor. He felt the blades sting the side of his tongue, but the graze was superficial. It didn’t even bleed. Words bustled behind Simon’s lips and, like a desperate sinner confessing to a priest, he blurted out the secrets he knew.

He told the Demon Father how Jake had travelled back to 1645 in order to retrieve Josiah Hobarron’s witch ball. With the magic contained in the ball, Jake hoped to cure Adam Harker and destroy Tobias Quilp and the Demon Father. But something had gone wrong, and Jake had overshot the time-frame by several months. He had arrived on 26th August 1645 in a town called Cravenmouth. Believing him to be a witch, the local sergeant may already have killed the boy.

A long pause greeted the end of the story.

‘You have done well,’ the sweet voice said at last. ‘Soon we shall see each other again, my child. Farewell.’

Simon heard a click and then the drone of an empty line. He looked down at the scissors and wished with all his heart that he had managed to cut out his tongue.

‘
Eleanor!
’

Jake gasped and surfaced out of the dream. A dream about an unknown girl that fractured around him and was quickly forgotten.

Feeble rays of sunlight touched Jake’s face. He moaned softly and raised himself onto one arm. He was lying on a rough flagstone floor dusted with straw and peppered with rat droppings. There was no blanket beneath him and the straw did little to keep out the bone-aching chill of the stone. He had been stripped of his clothes and dressed in a long coarse shirt that smelt of the sewer.

A sharp pain throbbed in his jaw. His fingers traced the tender flesh that had erupted along the right side of his face, temple to jawbone. Hot to the touch, his skin was as taut as a drumhead. Gingerly, he touched the inside of his mouth with his tongue and probed the back teeth behind the worst of the swelling. The testing tip was too much for one molar and it popped straight out of the gum. Jake spat the tooth and a mouthful of blood onto the floor. Then, groaning, he leaned back and took in his surroundings.

The room was a freezing stone box with dripping, moss-coated walls. Within easy reach stood a squalid wooden bucket over which a cloud of flies and bluebottles droned. A narrow window and a door studded with iron nails completed the picture. Jake tried to think back. Where was he? How had he got here?

As if to remind him, the scarab clicked its legs. When it had sensed Jake’s impending death, the Khepra Beetle had relaxed its grip, ready to leave its doomed host. The sergeant’s gun
had
been fired; Jake remembered hearing the whip-crack report of the pistol. So why wasn’t he now missing the best part of his head?

Jake’s hand returned to his face. His fingers roamed along his jaw and to the back of his head. He explored each inch of skin, praying that he wouldn’t find any serious damage. His prayers were not answered. Reaching the side of his head, Jake discovered that his right ear was gone—blown clean away by the shot. In its place was a small circular hole plugged with dry blood. And now Jake realized that the dull sensation at the side of his face was not just the result of swelling. He was partially deaf.

He tried his best not to panic. Magic, he thought. The power of the Witchfinder would heal him. Afterwards he would use the raw Oldcraft to free himself from the cell. He held out his hand, his gaze concentrated on the bowl of his palm. As usual, he delved into those memories of pain and despair that had ignited the magic before. They came to him as clearly as ever, the first among them being his mother’s murder at the hands of Tobias Quilp. That memory in particular nearly always provoked a magical response.

Not this time. Deep inside, where he had felt the glimmer of Oldcraft before, there was a dry emptiness. He swore and focused again on his mother’s death … Nothing. It was as if the whirlwind of power that had come to him through the Scarab Path had exhausted the last of his magic. Not wanting to believe that this was true, Jake crawled across the cell and pressed his hands against the locked door.

Open, open, open, OPEN!

Not a flicker. Not a spark.

He soon gave up on magic and pushed and hammered, dug his nails into the jamb and tried to prise the door open. It didn’t budge an inch.

Pain, fear, and confusion overwhelmed Jake. He returned to the back of the cell and slid down the wet, weeping wall. He clasped his hands around his knees and rocked back and forth. Separated by vast tracts of time from his father and his friends, he knew that he would die here. To the people of this town he was a dark sorcerer—an enemy to be thrown into a cell and left to rot. He would die as surely as his father would die centuries from now, both of them cursed by magic to leave this life before their time.

Jake looked around his little prison and felt despair clutch him in a cold embrace.

Time passed, each hour marked by the shaft of sunlight that crept across the floor. Occasionally, Jake would hear a hopeless scream or lunatic shriek echo out from some distant part of the prison. Despite these hellish cries, he felt despair begin to loosen its grip on his heart. He took strange comfort from the fact that the Khepra Beetle was still lodged inside his brain. The creature was obviously concerned with its own preservation and therefore sensed any threat to its host. As long as the beetle’s pincers remained tucked into his grey matter, he had a fighting chance. All he had to do now was find a way out of this prison.

Jake staggered to his feet. He had already tried the door and so he looked to the window. The barred opening stood at the end of a narrow channel that sloped down into the cell. This channel met the wall at a point just level with Jake’s shoulders. He managed to scramble up the wall and onto the slope, but holding his position was tricky. Twice he tumbled back, falling a metre and a half onto the hard stone floor. At the third attempt, he managed to brace his back and feet against the walls of the passage. Breathing hard, he whipped around so that his head was facing the window and his stomach was flat against the slope. Then, using his fingers and toes to find purchase, he inched his way along the channel. At last, he reached the bars and hauled himself up to the window.

The view made his heart sink.

Far below, he could see the huge green mound upon which his prison stood. To left and right, towers and battlements, barbican and bailey. From what he could make out, he was being held inside the keep of a great castle protected by a mighty wall and drawbridge. There was no escaping such a place.

Less than half a mile beyond the castle’s dried-up moat, Jake could see the town of Cravenmouth. The large community was encircled by an ancient wall dominated by two gate-houses stationed at either end of the town. In the fields outside, hundreds of men, women, and children were at work, picking at the ground, bundling sheaves of corn, guiding the ploughshare over rutted earth.

Most of the labourers seemed to be in the fields, but a few were at work around the wall. Using primitive wooden cranes, they moved blocks of stone into position. Cannons and mounted guns stood on the turrets of the gatehouses, their barrels pointing down the road that led from the forest to the town. Jake suddenly remembered that he had arrived in an England in the throes of civil war. The forces of the King and Parliament were fighting for the right to rule. Like every other town in the country, Cravenmouth feared bloodshed and so was rebuilding its fortifications.

Footsteps. The jangle of keys. The grind of a lock.

Jake slid back down the channel and tumbled to the floor. A moment later, the cell door was flung open. They came at him in a rush—Sergeant Monks and three other men, their faces hard but their eyes betraying their fear. Before Jake could think about reacting, they had fallen on him. Monks pressed his boot into Jake’s throat while the others busied themselves with ropes and shackles. His gaolers were artists in their trade, and within seconds he found himself chained to the wall of his prison.

Monks straightened up and wiped the sweat from his brow.

‘Comfortable, I trust?’

Jake held out his hand. ‘Please, I need to explai—’

‘None of that!’ Monks screeched, jumping back. ‘Not unless you want that damned witch hand cut clean off .’

‘But I’m not a witch.’

‘Hear that, lads? Not a witch, says he! Well, you mayn’t look like an evil old crone, but young men such as yourself are tried as witches every day in this godly realm.’

The other men laughed and spat on the ground, first to their left then their right.

‘But I can explain if you’ll just listen,’ Jake pleaded.

‘Oh, you’ve a smooth tongue, no doubt. Smooth as your master’s, I’ll be bound.’

‘My master?’

‘The arch fiend, Satan himself! That’s who you serve with your black imps. No doubt you’ve been consorting with them already, inside the very walls of Rake Castle.’ Monks’s piggy eyes flickered around the walls, as if he suspected that Jake’s demons might still be lurking somewhere in the brick-work. ‘Well, you’ll play with them no more now that you’re fettered. We should’ve bound you hours since, I suppose, but my nerves were sore tested by your coming amongst us. And then what with the vicar lecturing me—’

‘The vicar?’ Jake thought back. ‘The well-dressed man with green eyes.’

‘That’s him,’ Monks confirmed. ‘Mr Leonard Lanyon. You owe him your life. I was ready to shoot you down, but he knocked the pistol out of my hand. Only managed to graze the side of your head.’

‘Graze? You blew my ear off !’

‘You’re still pretty enough, with your soft, clean skin.’

Jake’s mind buzzed: this Leonard Lanyon had shown him mercy—perhaps he might be willing to help.

‘I’d like to thank Mr Lanyon. Will you ask him if he’ll see me?’

‘I ain’t your messenger boy!’ Monks hawked phlegm into his throat and lobbed it into Jake’s face. ‘You may well be thankful to Mr Lanyon now, but I’d wager that by the end of the week you’re cursing his name and wishing for the easy death my bullet might’ve granted.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Hear that, lads? He doesn’t know!’

Another bout of laughing and spitting.

‘Well, I did hear that witches had the All Seeing Eye,’ Monks said, choking back his mirth. ‘Don’t you know what’s a-coming, boy? Don’t you know
who
is on his way this very hour, this very minute, to the fair town of Cravenmouth?’

Jake could only shake his head. Monks dared a step closer to his prisoner. He squatted down and levelled his eyes with Jake’s.

‘The vicar won’t be able to save you this time. All that fine talk of execution without a trial being murder! Well, now Mr Lanyon will have his trial. Oh yes,
he
has been sent for, you see? All the town burgesses agreed and Richard Rake, Earl of Cravenmouth, put his seal on the letter. Now he is coming, and his tread upon the road is the certain sound of doom.’

Jake’s tongue felt like a strap of dry leather in his mouth.

‘Who’s coming?’

Monks ushered the other men out of the cell. Then turned and leered at Jake.

‘Matthew Hopkins is the name.’

Jake’s eyes widened. His skin puckered and his blood ran cold.

‘Say your prayers, boy, for the Witchfinder General has you in his sights.’

Chapter 17

Demonic Deception

Looking out from the rooftop balcony of the Grimoire Club, Rachel watched the blood-red sun slip behind the sand dunes. On cue, the twin moons of the borderlands appeared in the violet sky. When she had first arrived here, Rachel had been uneasy with the strangeness of this place. Everything had combined to unsettle her: foreign skies and unending deserts, ghostly managers and dog-headed doormen, monsters around every corner. Only Jake and Simon had steadied her. They had been her anchors to the real world, but now one of those anchors had gone and she felt herself drifting.