The Printer's Devil (26 page)

Presently she stood up and stretched stiff limbs. It seemed as though she had spent hours studying the contents of Joe Baker’s box. All the other items lay on the desk before her, pieces of a jigsaw, which, fitted together, would set things to rights. Or not. The world hung disconcertingly in balance, somewhere close to Kim’s mind, and whatever she did next must set something in motion. She felt a dizzying sense that everything in her life had been intended to draw her to this moment, and it staggered her.It had not rained since the previous day, when she had made it stop.

That, at least, was something. On an odd impulse, she went into Alan’s study and started rummaging through his filing cabinet, thankful that this was one thing he did keep in some sort of order.

The file she was looking for contained an article entitled
A Pattern of Changes,
copious photocopies from reference works, and, in a plastic folder on its own, another photocopy: this of the manuscript of the sole surviving song from Matthew Boys’ opera, the first true English opera,
Peter Abelard.
She studied the idiosyncratic notation for a while, but it was too different from the numerical paths which bells follow and she could not tell, really, whether it
was
the music of Stedman Doubles. But the first six notes of the melody were ‘rounds’, in a way - six descending notes, DCBAGF. And every sixth note was the same, like the tenor covering. It was, she thought with a sigh, yet another damned code to decipher.

‘Il mio nome non sai,’
she sang to herself.
‘Dimmi il mio nome, dimmi il mio nome prima dell’alba... You do not know my name; tell it to me before dawn comes...
’ Caught for an instant, she read the lyrics of the sad little song, Heloise’s aria:

‘For me there are noe Seasons since the theft Of Spring whereat I woke a time ago;

Brief Summer fled ere I had space to knowe His sudden Sunne, and here I lye bereft.

The gawdy Leaves of Autumn are made lowe:

The Frost takes all the Vertue from their Gold And starves my Hart and verie Soule with Cold;

And falls o’er Alle the muted, chilling Snow.

Thus doth my time, so Brief, draw to her close,

Nor shal the Sunne return to wake my Hart;

The dawns may pale, the yeare shal turne agayne,

The Seasons even Change; yet for my Part I am to dust returnd. Thus Dyes the Rose,

Thus falle the Hills at last: thus Endes all Pain.’

It appeared to be scored for soprano, Kim observed, and frowned: had Matthew Boys intended women to sing and act on stage, against all convention? Or would Heloise have been played by a boy, or even a castra-to? She shook her head, annoyed at having spent time in such unprofitable speculation, and returned to her own study with the song held loosely in her hand.

They stared at her, the things on the desk. The battered journal; the cuttings and the pamphlets (the missing pages now restored to James Rendall’s); the dull bronze Victoria Cross, too heavy, when she picked it up, for its small size; the scrying-glass, squatting like a toad in the corner.

So, she thought. The answer is here. The way to destroy a demon, free Alan from possession, lay a wizard’s soul to final rest, and set back the world as it once was. She grimaced at the immensity of the task.

Suddenly, like the stars coming out, she realised that it was Southwell himself who was, after all, the key.

The demon wanted - had always sought - him. His essence; his soul. The magus had apparently kept his foe at bay with the music of Stedman’s principle, played endlessly on his own strange carillon, but could not destroy it. They were bound to each other, endlessly circling, like a pair of wary wrestlers.

I will give Southwell to the demon,
Kim thought.
I’ll stake him out like a goat for bait, and when it comes, the music will destroy it, and him too, because it will not be silenced.

A small voice within her insisted that the music was not enough, that more would be required.

‘It’s all I know to do,’ she said aloud.

Somehow reluctant to act, although a kind of decision had been made, she picked up the now-complete pamphlet. Yet still she was not sure how essential the bells themselves were: Southwell must have thought them important, since, according to the pamphlet, he had bequeathed them to the church of Market Peverell. That the treble had remained in Fenstanton was pure chance: All Saints’ treble had developed a crack at the time when the bells were being moved, and the good folk of Market Peverell had kindly offered Southwell’s treble to them.

Kim was certain, however, that if sound-recording had been available to the magus, he would have used it. Bell-metal, after all, being a mixture of copper and tin, had no magical properties that she knew of, not in the way which cold iron was reputed to. It was the sound, the combination of notes, the harmonies, which had the power. It had to be.

She knew she was prevaricating.

Even as the thought came, she stretched out her hand to the scrying-glass, as if its magnetism had just that instant been switched on. Her fingers closed round it, and a tingle went up her arm.

Picking it up, Kim looked at it dispassionately, observing how it magnified her palm, lifeline, heartline. The patterns of her skin were enlarged through it into a leather-grain. But it did not appear to reflect her face. Or maybe it was her face which cast no reflection, she thought: feeling strangely un-anchored to the world; unfixed in time.

That part of her which inhabited elsewhere could not marvel, as her twentieth-century self did, at the extraordinary smoothness of the glass, because she knew it to have been created by no human agency; and for no good purpose.

A sentence popped into her mind just then, and, like a quotation, she spoke it aloud.

‘I put my will upon you,’ she said, and looked into the glass.

Instantly the air changed and utter dread sluiced over Kim. A horror ate at her soul, attacking her suddenly and without warning from all directions at once. She knew, with certainty, that something intent on the most diabolical malice bent over her, something invisible but all-encompassing. If it had shown her teeth like a shark’s, claws like a tiger’s, she would have been relieved.

The room filled up to the ceiling with icy cold and a stink of rot. Feral laughter seared her ears: a bitter, hard, predatory sound of entirely the wrong shape to emanate from anything so human as a throat. Her skin prickled; she felt sweat course down her face, her sides; all down her body. And all Kim’s optimism drained away, all her hopes, all her stubborn conviction that everything would, in the end, be all right. Worms crept into her mind, tears into her eyes, and dust fell over all.

There was nothing left to draw strength from.
₁₂₃

Again the mocking laughter sounded, harsh and final, a sound with no one source: it came from everywhere at once. She knew, through some supernormal sense, that she was being toyed with, teased, before the terror would rip her physical body to pieces and leave her mind screaming and naked in the eternal darkness, violated unceasingly, helpless before the triumphant mirth of that most ancient of all enemies.

So Kim, with nowhere left to turn, reached within herself. And there she found, so buried she almost missed it, a core of strength which grew into a kind of armour, then more than armour - a weapon. In another age she might have called it faith. It was stubbornness which lay within, not the workaday pig-headedness she’d always had - but steel; adamant, fortress. A force which turned her fear to cold fury, and focused it like a laser beam.

‘Begone,’ she said impatiently.

The room emptied all at once, as suddenly as it filled, just as if a plug had been pulled out. Kim became aware that her left hand was numb, and looked down. It lay in her lap, wrapped round her right, which itself enclosed the scrying-glass. Thoughtfully she lifted this and put it to one side, seeing an impression on the back of her hand which matched the relief of the surface of the Victoria Cross she held in her left.

Kim stared at her country’s highest honour for quite a long time, a number of thoughts chasing each other through her head. Foremost amongst them was a connection suddenly made, that the medal she held was made of bronze.

An alloy of copper and tin.

As was bell-metal.

Alan could barely remember being nineteen. He knew, as an intellectual fact, that he had once been a teenager; could even picture himself as he had been then, never really afflicted very much by the ills of adolescence. Never fitting in terribly well, either: he liked the Beatles better now than he ever had then; he had not been terribly interested in chasing girls, or very good at sport.

This felt different.

He knew it must be different. Whether it was an effect of the ointment, or of some other change in him, he neither knew nor cared. Everything seemed brighter, more alive, as if the world had suddenly been carbonated. Chatting with Debbie, the whole fizzing of it threatened to overwhelm him; if this were lust, it was of an entirely different species than any he had ever felt, more intense, more exciting, more wholly delightful. He was almost breathless with it. When she had brushed him accidentally descending the narrow tower staircase, a kind of effervescent shock buzzed through him.

He sat drinking coffee with the Griffithses, and Ted and Zoe, scratching Blondie’s ears while trying to make polite conversation and look as if he were in a strange house. Which he was, in a way, being not the same Alan Bellman who had sat there many times before. Subtle threads tugged him, his own self one way, his new persona another. And a third (that odd sense of being visited) in yet a different direction. He was in three pieces, a curious and disparate trinity.

Debbie blew him a kiss when he left.

By the time he got back to the car-park, he felt exhausted, and a disquieting thought possessed him: he had

never knowingly learned of an antidote. However, when he looked in the rear-view mirror he saw Alan
Bellman again sandy-haired and thirty-five. He breathed in deeply, trying to slow his thudding heart, and turned on the ignition. As he drove slowly home he found his lips whistling. Of their own accord, it seemed. It was a moment before he recognised the music:
Caro nome, Dear name,
from
Rigoletto.
Debbie had been singing it earlier.

As he turned the corner into their road, he saw something which was extraordinary even by the standards of what had happened lately. There appeared to be a heat-haze shimmering between himself and his home, but such a heat-haze as Alan had never seen or could have imagined. It was dark, like tinted glass.

A wall of immeasurable height, it towered into the sky until his eyes lost it. Beyond it, the world glimmered, all stained and tainted with its blackness. As he drew nearer, he grew very afraid, and abruptly pulled into the kerb and turned the engine off.

Gazing at the shuddering, disturbed air, he almost decided to do a three-point turn and drive away again. Instead he got out of the car and walked warily towards the barrier, halting about twelve feet away. From there he could hear a faint buzzing, as of insects, and a curious rustling sound.

His mouth was suddenly dry, and his knees felt shaky. He swallowed to try and get some saliva circulating, and moistened parched lips with his tongue. Alan found his lower lip was stinging as he licked it: it had cracked open in the centre, but was too dry to bleed. He did not know why he was afraid, but something about what he was seeing terrified him, and not only because it stood between him and his home.

It was almost physically impossible to move. Alan had never before appreciated how true it was that one could be paralysed with fright. He concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Another step. Then a third. Alan was shaking all over now, and his mind was shrieking and howling at him to run.

He looked up, and knew terror.

The wall was made up of flies. There must have been millions, thousands of millions, a myriad of them, hovering in the air, each one no bigger than a match-head, all keeping formation. Alan moaned in dread, and never knew he was doing it.

And then, as if a wind had suddenly risen, the insects dispersed. It was an almost instantaneous thing: too fast, almost, to believe. One moment they were there, then gone, in a hum of tiny wings; the shadowed world grew bright once more.

Alan started to run down the road.

‘And mixt with these, a lady, one that arm’d...

Had beat her foes with slaughter from her walls...

Nor bent, nor broke, nor shunn’d a soldier’s death,

But now when all was lost or seem’d as lost...

Brake with a blast of trumpets from the gate,

And, falling on them like a thunderbolt,

She trampled some beneath her horses’ heels,

And some were whelm’d with missiles of the wall,

And some were push’d with lances from the rock,

And part were drown’d within the whirling brook... ’

Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
The Princess

Kim looked out of the window, across centuries, it seemed, hearing Alan’s voice shout her name and seeing him run towards the house, not knowing that he saw her standing there like an icon - while another part of her, or another memory, or another Kim Sotheran entirely, saw another man running.