The Cockatrice Boys (20 page)

Sauna might have thought she was now immune to shocks, but the back room startled her so much that she had to lean against the door frame to get her breath. For—apart from a dresser along the opposite wall—the room was a faithful replica of her Aunt Florence's front parlour in the flat in Manchester. Here was the table with its discoloured lace cloth, here the red velour-covered chairs, the television set, the tiled fireplace with a paper fan in a jam jar, the potted palm and, covering every horizontal surface, the myriads of little china mugs and vases, each with its message: “A Present from Southsea,” “A Present from Westcliffe,” “A Present from Hove,” “A Present from Margate,” “A Present from St. Leonards-on-Sea.”

The sight of the back room was so staggering that Sauna had to lean against the wall till her legs recovered their strength. She stared at what she saw for a long minute, almost stupefied with disbelief. They can't be here. They just can't. How can they?

Then—
is
that Aunt Florence, after all?

If not, who else can it be?

Noting an old enamel milkpan and a battered spoon and fork on the dresser, she mechanically picked up these articles and returned to the front room.

There she had her second shock in five minutes, quite as bad as the first one. For the figure on the bed was now sitting bolt upright, grinning at her with eyes turned to slits.

“Getting settled in? That's right,” remarked the high, lilting voice. “Make a little porridge, why don't you? Aye, parritch, parritch—a gude Scots dish!” And the creature giggled, showing two rows of yellow artificial teeth.

“
Are
you Aunt Florence?”

“Who else should I be, dearie? Or else I'll do till the next one comes along.” Another giggle. “But I told you. I am the Queen of Air and Darkness. All the powers of the air are my friends. Astarte, Abiron, Asmodeus, Belial, Buktanoos, Baal, Chemosh, Dusien, Eblis, Musboot, Zulbazan … all, all my friends. And this one, too.”

She gave a twitch to her blankets, and—to Sauna's horror—a grey head poked out from under them: that of a large, flea-bitten, seedy-looking rat, which peered watchfully at Sauna, showed its teeth, then let out a shrill, thin, hostile sound between a hiss and a squeak.

“
Oh no!
” Sauna clutched her pan by the handle, raised it up instinctively—she detested rats—but the voice from the bed halted her.

“Don't you go for to bash him, dearie. He's my friend.
He
won't hurt
you,
if
you
don't hurt
him.
That is—not unless I tell him.”

Aunt Florence grinned again, slit-eyed.

“We find our friends where we can, eh? Don't we, my bubsy, my mutchkin? My precious, my piggesnie? Where we can. Later on, you can see my
other
friends. Yes; later on they'll be back. Now you make that porridge, why don't you? We must keep strong, yes, keep strong. And ratto here would be glad of a nuncheon.”

*   *   *

At Alloa the
Cockatrice
crew had a lot of bridge-building to do before the viaduct across the Links of Forth was safe; it took them two days' work, and the nights were passed in battling off hordes of Kelpies who would have undone all the work again.

Alloa was a fishing and ferry town where large boats had once tied up. It lay between three rivers, the Devon, the Black Devon, and the wide Forth itself, meandering in shining links across the marshy plain to meet its estuary. Few people lived here any more, because of the Kelpies, which came in extra numbers because of the double tides. The town was wreathed in juicy green weed and smelt of salt damp. To the north, less than a mile away across the flat floor of the valley, on the other side of the Devon river, rose the menacing slopes of the Ochils, like a steep volcanic wall—which they once had been—clothed in oak and fir, capped with snow.

There was a rumour running about the train that a big battle was imminent. No one knew where it had started. Everybody was keyed-up and excited.

When Dakin took in the colonel's eleven o'clock acorn coffee (he had been allotted this task since the loss of Sauna) he found a conference going on with Clipspeak, Upfold, Major Scanty, and the archbishop.

“There is a legend, a folk-myth, or whatever you care to call it, current in Melrose that Michael Scott spent some of the last weeks of his life in Sorrow Abbey. And that he may perhaps have left the book there,” said Dr. Wren.

“Oh!” exclaimed Dakin, suddenly putting two and two together. “That must have been what old Liquorice was jawing on about—I mean, Tom Flint. Sorrow, he kept saying. Sorrow, Sorrow.”

“Flint? He mentioned Sorrow Abbey? What did he say about it?” Dr. Wren was galvanized. “Why, pray, did you not tell us this before?”

“I forgot,” mumbled Dakin. “He said such a lot. It didn't seem important. He was going on and on about glens and abbeys and hermits' caves…”

“You
forgot!
Wretched boy! Did he mention the location of Sorrow Abbey?”

“Is it not on the map?” suggested Colonel Clipspeak hopefully.

“Unfortunately no, Colonel. It was sacked and pillaged so many times during the Border Wars that its whereabouts now are wholly uncertain. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that it is not too far distant from the town of Dollar (probably Dolour in the first place), and presumably situated somewhere in Glen Sorrow, which runs up from Dollar to the north-east of Ben Cleuch.”

“Yes, that makes sense,” agreed the colonel, consulting his wall map. “But if it is not there any longer I do not see that there is much use in sending an expeditionary force to search for this hypothetical volume—if there are not even
ruins.
We can hardly search the whole glen?”

“What else did Tom Flint say to you, boy? Try to rack your brains—this is terribly important.”

“The book. He said it was wrapped in cloth of copper. Pinned with a gold pin. What is this book, sir?”

“Michael Scott's
Book of Power.
It is said to answer every possible question—whether moral, scientific, practical, or theoretical.”

“A kind of Enquire Within Upon Everything,” remarked Upfold. “Pretty handy, hey? Would presumably tell us how to get rid of the monsters.”

“What is even
more
important,” said Dr. Wren, “is to prevent it falling into the hands of the adversaries.”

“Adversaries. That was what Flint called them too,” said Dakin. “His friends, he said they were.”

“Fine friends! He'll be sorry at the end of the day,” snapped Scanty.

“Yes,” recalled Dakin. “He wasn't so happy about them when he thought they had skived off and left him, and his hands and feet hurt him so bad. I asked where they had taken Sauna and he said—wait a mo, I'm getting it—something about Crook of Devon and Rumbling Bridge. He said—he said there were lots of witches there.”

“Used to be, a couple of centuries ago,” said Dr. Wren. “The Ochils have always been borderline country—between lowlands and highlands, between this world and the next. Did Flint say what his friends proposed to do with the
Book of Power?
”

“I've forgotten,” said Dakin sadly. “Something to do with the disintegration of the human ethos. There was a lot of long words.”

“Oh, why didn't I stay with the miserable wretch myself?” lamented the archbishop.

“You were saving a good many men's lives who had been severely hurt by Basilisks,” the colonel briskly reminded him. “Who would almost certainly be dead by now if it weren't for you.”

They all stared at Dakin, as if they would like to pull memory out of him like teeth.

“Maximum chaos,” Dakin remembered. “First they got the monsters through a hole in the ozone layer. Now they want to stir up more trouble.”

“And the book will help them do this.”

“S'pose so.”

Dakin felt dreadfully tired. What with watching Tom Flint, and guilty worry over Sauna, and the Kelpie battle, and then feeling that everybody disapproved of him, all he wanted to do was lie down and forget his troubles in sleep. He was aware of the onset of a yawn, working its way up all the way from his toes. He struggled against it until his ears crackled, but out it came.

“All right, boy, you can go,” said the colonel wearily.

A croaking voice suddenly made them all jump. It came from nobody in the room. It was faint, as if it floated in from far away, shrill and full of malice.

“Don't go to Dollar!” it said. “Don't go to Dollar!” And then ran off into gabbled nursery nonsense. “A dillar a dollar a ten o'clock scholar, what makes you rise so soon, don't look for Sauna unless you would mourn her, she'll die before the new moon. King Edward's Day, King Edward's Day. That's when they gather, that's when they play. That's when their strength is highest. We must, we must have it by then.”

The voice died away.

“That was my Auntie Floss,” said Dakin, working his tongue around his mouth to moisten it. “Or, at least, it sounded like her the time I went to her place in Manchester. And I thought I heard Sauna's voice too—just for a moment.”

They all stared at him. He suddenly remembered something.

“Tom Flint had this bit of paper. He said his friends forgot he had it. He couldn't read it. Nor could I. I put it in my pocket when the siren went—”

He pulled it out: dirty, crumpled, greasy, slightly frayed at the cracks where it had been folded.

The eyes of everybody in the room fastened on it like staples.

“That's Ogham script,” said Dr. Wren.

“Can you read it?” asked the colonel.

Chapter ten

Auntie Floss giggled almost all the time now. She sat with her unbelievably skinny bare legs sticking straight out in front of her on the low bed, and rubbed dark green ointment on to her fingers and toes. Sauna noticed, without any particular increase of disgust, that she had webs between her toes, and there were not so many toes as most people have.

“Always get terrible chilblains this time of year,” Floss confided, in the high wheezy voice that sounded like a tape played at double speed. “Wintergreen is best for chilblains. I told them, Put it in the box. In the box, I told them.”

The box of groceries might have been packed by a computer. There was powdered tarragon, but no sugar; flour, but no butter; isinglass, but no soap; gum tragacanth, but no mustard; biscuits, but no cheese; washing-soda, but no salt. Tins of corned beef and soup were useless because there was no tin-opener, either in the box or in the cottage. Sauna had managed to cook a potful of porridge over the fire with oatmeal and some water from the barrel (this was full of green slime, but she supposed that boiling would disinfect it). When the blizzard outside died down a little she fetched in a bowlful of snow and left it to melt. And she found an iron bar to poke the fire with, and more peat in a shed.

Seen in daylight the wicker figure outside the door, now thickly covered with snow, looked harmless and inoffensive enough; she supposed that it was simply put there to frighten. Or perhaps as a sign, like a barber's pole: this is the witch's cottage.

“How long have you been here, Aunt Floss?” she tried asking.

The creature on the bed giggled.

“Fifty years, my dearie. Since the newspapers were first put down on the floor. Your grandpa was alive then. I put down those papers. They've lasted well.”

“That's just not possible,” Sauna said. “Anyway, the papers are only ten years old.”

But that was all the answer she got.

Among the contents of the cardboard carton were countless pills, in various little pots and vials and bottles and flasks. Aunt Floss swallowed pills continually in handfuls.

She used to do that in Manchester too, remembered Sauna; that is, if it is Auntie Floss? Or does she just do it to make me believe that she is Auntie Floss?

“When you get to my age and state of health, dearie, your system needs extra vitamins,” the creature giggled. “You'll have to start taking them too, by and by. When you take on the job here. It wears you out, that it does!”

“I'm not staying here,” Sauna said.

“That's what you think, dearie. You'll feel different later.”

When the porridge was cooked, Sauna ate hers out of the saucepan, standing in the open front door, looking at the whirling snow. She had found only one bowl on the dresser, so spooned a helping of porridge into it for the creature on the bed, but could not bear to be a spectator of the eating process. She had a horrible feeling that the oatmeal was in fact eaten by the rat, Maukin, who peered out sometimes from under the covers and bared its teeth evilly at Sauna.

“My mannie,” Aunt Floss called it. “My little piggesnie. My ratto.”

After midday, when the snow began to slacken off, Aunt Floss said, “We'll tell our fortunes. Now go in the parlour, switch on the TV.”

“Are you crazy? There's no current. There's no electricity. No aerial.”

Aunt Floss giggled. “
That's
no matter! We managed without it for thousands of years. Switch on, I say.”

Shrugging, Sauna went into the back room.

“Mind my china!” came the shrill exhortation. “Mind my precious things!”

Edging between the table with its load of tiny china pots and the wall, Sauna pressed the ON button of the TV set. A light flickered in the middle of the screen.

She suddenly heard Dakin's voice saying, “The book will help them.”

Colonel Clipspeak said, “They want to stir up more trouble.”

Aunt Floss in the next room cried out, “Don't go to Dollar! Don't go to Dollar! You'll all be killed if you do!” Then she began to sing, a squeaky nursery rhyme.

“Stop that!” shouted Sauna. She pressed the button again. The flickering light faded and vanished.