Gallows at Twilight (38 page)

Jake did not answer.

Let me feel your magic and I will do as you ask.

An outraged shriek came from the shadows. Jake glanced around but there was still no trace of the witch.

‘You serve my master!’ Quilp cried. ‘The Demon Father commands you!’

We demons are capricious creatures, Mr Quilp, and the boy’s power intrigues me.

Quilp’s manic screams faded away.

Now, child,
the demon box whispered,
how shall we occupy ourselves during our journey? Shall I show you visions of your dead mother? Your slow-dying father? Or shall I—
?

A blue flame stood out against the darkness. Holding it aloft, Jake shook his head.

‘I’d shut up, if I were you. Dimensions of suffering, endless torment, but when all’s said and done you’re still just an old wooden box.’ The flame billowed in Jake’s hand. ‘And I bet wood and magical fire don’t mix too well.’

You wouldn’t dare.

Jake grinned. ‘I’ve had a pretty rough few weeks, demon. Don’t test me.’

* * *

Shouts, whoops, cheers, and catcalls.

Thousands of monstrous faces ranged all around him.

It was a strange scene. Why were all these creatures packed into the square outside the Grimoire Club? For now Jake put the question out of his mind and concentrated on the doorway. He transferred the ball of magic from hand to hand while his senses strained at the silence within the nightmare box.

At last, a pale presence in the darkness. The cultured voice.

‘No Crowden sister to help you now, boy. No pretty little wretch to divert your attention. It’s just you and me.’

The first twist of anger coiled in Jake’s gut.

‘Do you remember our first meeting on the road to the Hobarron Institute?’

Quilp’s cadaverous face shone in the gloom. His claw-like hands curled around the side of the door.

‘Less than a year ago, and you, such a miserable little child.’

The witch stepped out of the box and into the dying light. A few of the dark creatures recognized him and the whisper of his name rustled around the square. Quilp did not look once at the crowd; his full attention was focused on Jake. A blaze ignited in his palm and bathed his pallid features in a smoky red light. The enemies began to circle each other.

‘Do you remember how you wailed when I took your mother’s head?’ Quilp purred. ‘How you bawled and bleated when I cut her down and gave her to the fishes? You must remember. How could so much blood ever be forgotten?’

Anger strengthened into fury. Blades of white-hot rage sliced through Jake’s mind. He saw his mother just as Quilp described her: a headless corpse falling into the murk of the canal. All it had taken was a slash of the witch’s finger.

‘That’s it,’ Quilp laughed. ‘Remember her as she is—your stinking, putrid corpse of a mother. Feel the pain that I feel for my Esther.’

Something inside Jake snapped. To hear his mother spoken of in the same breath as Esther Inglethorpe brought every shred of darkness roaring out of his soul. The flame in his hand turned from blue to deepest, darkest red.

Jake looked back at his foe and grinned.

‘That withered old hag?’ he mused. ‘That rancid old bag of bones? Is she really what all this is about? Cos, I gotta say, she was just about the most hopeless excuse for a dark witch I’ve ever seen. We didn’t even need magic to kill her. All it took was a single bullet, smack through the brain.’

‘Shut up.’

‘One bullet. Just one, ordinary kill-a-human-stone-dead bullet.’

‘I said, shut up.’

Jake’s eyes reddened in the light of his magic. He put his head to one side and pouted his lips.

‘Oh dear, have I upset you, Mr Quilp? Do you really miss Mother Inglethorpe that much?’

He strode forward, magic swirling in his grasp. His long, bleak shadow fell over Tobias Quilp.

‘Then let me send you to hell too!’

Jake poured every scrap of spite and hurt, pain and bitterness, hatred and cruelty into the flame. His brain screamed. His heart wept. Fuelled by the agonies he had suffered at the hands of Quilp and his kind, Jake crafted a spell of pitch-black malevolence. Its ferocity was shaped by the blood on the walls of Hobarron Tower; by the loss of his friend, Brett Enfield; by the slaughter of the magician Sidney Tinsmouth; by the death of his mother; by the hexing of his father; by the scars on the face of the girl he had lost. He could feel this new magic boil in the very pit of his soul and run out like poison through his veins. It scorched his fingers, burned his skin, but he did not release it until he was sure that he had nothing left to give. When the spell was done, Jake looked down into his hand and gloried in the darkness.

Even the most evil of the creatures in the crowd gasped at sight of the flame. It burned with such ferocious power that the flaming sun on the horizon seemed to dim in awe of it.

All the swagger drained from Tobias Quilp. He staggered away from Jake, tripped and fell to the ground. His own dark magic spluttered in his hand.

‘Mr Quilp,’ Jake shook his head, ‘what’s wrong with you? Scared of a little dark magic? Tell you what, I’ll give you a sporting chance and let you go first.’

Quilp took Jake at his word. Whispering a few incantations, he released three feeble bolts which Jake swatted away with ease.

‘’S that all you’ve got?’ Jake squatted down to Quilp’s level, the dark red flame spinning in his hand. ‘I’m not going to kill you, Tobias. Not just yet anyway. Let’s have some fun first, shall we? I’ll give you twenty seconds.’

‘W-what?’

‘Tick-tock, tick-tock. That’s four seconds gone already.’

Quilp wiped a shaking hand across his mouth.

‘I don’t … Please, I don’t understand.’

‘Ten seconds gone. You’re wasting valuable time, Tobias.’

‘But, I—’

Jake thrust his face forward. ‘Run.’

Quilp didn’t need telling twice. He scrabbled to his feet and set off across the square. Howls of derision followed the fleeing witch while the crowd roared its approval for Jake. He found that he liked the adulation. Turning on the spot, he held up the crackling, spitting orb. Faces spread into wicked grins and clawed fists punched the air.

‘Thataboy, Jake! Play with the witch! Make him suffer!’

‘Strike him down, Jake! Do it now!’

‘Slaughter him!’

‘Finish him!’

‘Kill him!’

‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’

Jake called over his shoulder to Quilp—

‘Run!’

Of course, he had no intention of letting the murderer escape.

‘
Run!
’

He was just giving him the illusion of freedom. An illusion he would snatch away …

‘RUUUUN!’

Now.

A final charge of dark thoughts and the flame billowed higher than ever.

Quilp was on the far side of the square, making for one of the teardrop doorways.

Jake licked his lips.

Targeted his victim.

Threw back his hand.

And …

‘Jake!’

Her voice.

Jake glanced over his shoulder and there she was, running to meet him. Her skin shone and her yellow hair dazzled in the sunset. She was here. She was real. Her words reverberated in his heart—

You must never let the darkness win or I will truly have lost you.

Eleanor’s hand slipped into his. In Jake’s other hand, the magic immediately transformed. The red light vanished and a pure, blue flame rose up in its place.

‘Thank you,’ he whispered.

Reaching back, Jake hurled the Oldcraft magic across the square.

‘I’m not going to hurt him,’ he said, ‘but he can’t escape with the witch ball.’

The magic hurtled past Quilp and into the teardrop doorway. From beyond came a thunderous crack and the rumble of falling stone. The way had been blocked. Quilp panicked and tried to head for one of the other portals but the dark creatures clubbed together and would not let him pass. With no choice left, the witch ducked into the doorway he had originally chosen.

One of the larger forest trolls that had gathered around the door called out to Jake.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Harker, we’ll keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn’t find a way out. You just catch your breath. Great show, by the way!’

A ripple of applause greeted this remark. Clearly some of the dark creatures had wanted Jake to finish the witch, but few could deny that they had witnessed a real spectacle.

Jake turned to the girl beside him.

Yellow hair. Sea-green eyes. Not Eleanor of the May, but Rachel Saxby.

‘Jake,’ Rachel smiled through her tears. ‘You look disappointed to see me.’

Jake wrapped his arms around her.

‘Disappointed?’ he laughed. ‘Are you kidding? I never thought I’d see you again! Rachel, I’m so sorry about everything. I shouldn’t have run away like that. I just—’

A boy with a crooked lip tapped Rachel on the shoulder.

‘Sorry, Rach, but Jake and I need a word.’

Jake stepped back and held out his hand to Simon.

‘Friends?’

‘No.’

‘Simon,’ Rachel protested.

‘Friends don’t shake hands,’ Simon grinned, and threw his arms around Jake. After five solid minutes of hugging he held Jake at arm’s length and scowled. ‘But don’t you ever do that to us again, understand? Now, I think we better go and sort out that witch.’

It was cold beyond the teardrop doorway. Dust from the explosion billowed all around, but high above, where the vine-tentacles creaked, it was beginning to clear. A delighted Mr Murdles (
‘A triumph, Jacob! A masterpiece of magical theatre! Enough money in the pot for at least three hundred ecto-suits!’
) had provided Jake and his friends with powerful electric torches which they now swept around the ceiling. Dislodged by Jake’s spell, ancient chunks of stone had fallen and blocked the tunnel path that led back to Yaga Passage and London. Jake wondered whether Quilp had instinctively chosen this portal over the others. The doorway that led back to the old headquarters of the Crowden Coven.

The witch called out from the mist.

‘My pet? Are you there?’

The sound of claws dragging across the ground. A pair of yellow eyes glowed dully in the dust. Rachel swept the bow from her back and notched an arrow, Simon brandished the short, heavy club that he had borrowed from Razor.

‘No,’ Jake held out his hand. ‘Let him pass.’

Mr Pinch hobbled between the friends, eyes downcast. Every movement caused him to whimper through the ragged, wet hole that served as his nose. Not a single tooth had survived Frija Crowden’s attack, and without them the gummy creature looked old and somehow pathetic. Injuries that would have killed any mortal were nevertheless taking their toll on the demon. Swollen to twice its normal size, Pinch’s shattered skull swayed left and right on the spindle of his broken neck.

‘You’re sure it’s a good idea?’ Rachel asked. ‘Letting him go to the witch?’

‘Quilp’s power is fading,’ Jake whispered, ‘I can feel it.’

‘But why?’

‘Because he no longer believes in his magic or in himself.’

The friends stayed where they were and let the dust settle.

Ghostly in the dimness, Quilp’s face emerged from the mist. He seemed to be standing on higher ground. The dust fell another three metres and Jake saw that the witch was in fact perched on the low brick wall that surrounded the Oracle’s pit. Mr Pinch reached out to his master, like a toddler begging to be picked up. Quilp lifted the demon and laid him gently on the wall. Then he turned to his enemy.

‘Bravo, Jacob, bravo.’ He clapped his thin hands. ‘You have beaten me.’

The cultured voice had lost its sneer and there was nothing mocking in Quilp’s applause.

‘In all my years of study and practice, I have never seen such dark magic as you conjured today.’

‘That wasn’t me,’ Jake said.

‘Is that so?’ Quilp tapped a long finger against his chin. ‘I wonder. What is the source of that righteous anger, Jacob? That merciless rage? Perhaps one day you will find out.’

‘We’re not here to discuss me, Tobias,’ Jake said. ‘We need to decide what’s going to happen to you. My dad will know what to do, but first you have to agree to come with us, qui etly and peacefully.’

‘You don’t want to kill me any more?’

‘Part of me does,’ Jake admitted. ‘The worst part.’

He glanced down at the hand that had conjured the darkness.
Such power
…

‘But I can’t let you go. You’re too dangerous.’

Jake stepped forward. As he did so, Quilp mirrored him, taking a step back towards the precipice.

‘Do you honestly think that I will let you take me alive?’ The witch managed one of his old bitter laughs. ‘I am Tobias Quilp, Second in Command of the Crowden Coven.’

‘There is no Crowden Coven.’ Jake reached out, as if to bridge the distance between them and pull Quilp back from the edge. ‘Please, if you let me I can help you.’

‘Help
me
?’

‘It’s possible,’ Jake nodded. ‘My dad worked with Sidney Tinsmouth. He helped Sidney reclaim his soul.’

‘And you would help me do this? The man who butchered your mother?’

Jake closed his eyes and saw her. She came to him, not as the headless horror Quilp had made her, but whole and vibrant and alive. Claire Harker, his mother.

‘Yes, I’ll help you,’ Jake breathed. ‘Gladly.’

Silence in the portal. Silence in the square beyond, where the dark creatures strained to hear every word. Even the tentacles overhead had ceased their creaking.

Quilp, lost and frightened, looked back at Jake.

‘Who are you?’ His voice shivered. ‘What manner of mortal could stretch out his hand to so bitter a foe? You should not be. You are
monstrous
.’

Jake took another small step forward.

Quilp backed up until only the tips of his shoes clung to the wall. Below, in the unlit depths of the pit, the guardians of the Oracle waited. Jake imagined their thick white bodies uncoiling, their heads reaching up and their poisonous mouths gaping wide. The witch quaked on the precipice. He pulled back his coat and reached inside.