by F. G. Cottam
Dawn got the TV remote and turned the news channel on. They were starting to release the names of some of the passengers who’d died aboard the crashed Jumbo. They included an eighty-strong child choir on their way to St Paul’s Cathedral for some sort of religious festival. One pundit said it was the sort of occurrence that made people doubt their faith.
Dawn could not remember ever having had any faith to doubt. Though having magic demonstrably proven to her as something real and even practical had recently made her think hard about matters beyond the physical world. Intellectually, she understood the concepts of good and bad. But she honestly had more of an interest in what was achievable and what wasn’t.
Magic was tricky. She’d already had a couple of setbacks. But her car-driver analogy held true. Even a Grand Prix champion started at the beginning with L-plates and an instructor.
She would become better and, eventually, she would become an expert. It would become second nature and then would transform into instinct and when that happened, she’d have the world at her feet. And by then, it would be a world she’d be shaping.
But for now, it was revision. She switched off the TV. She went and got her school bag and took it into the kitchen and sat at the table, thinking she ought to empty that smelly fish tank. There was a clatter from the bottom of the stairs as her brother, presumably unseeing now, collided with a pile of cans of something in the cellar. She could empty the fish tank later. The smell was tolerable, for now. She rummaged in her bag for her Spanish grammar and then opened it with a sigh.
THIRTEEN
The Keller archive was kept under lock and key. Pages almost 500 years old were fragile. They had to be handled in a sterile environment and wearing cotton gloves so that secretions from the pads of a person’s fingers didn’t damage them.
It didn’t contain the stuff that had sent him to the stake. That had been torn to shreds and thrown like heretical confetti on to the bunched faggots at his feet as the fire that would consume him began to take hold and he roared curses at his judge and executioners, at the jeering hoard of onlookers, on the country that had condemned him and on Lower Saxony’s statutes and its principles and its religious convictions.
Keller’s death was not delivered quickly. Earlier rain had dampened the wood fuelling the flames. Witnesses said the whole bottom half of him had burned away before he finally succumbed a full hour after the pyre was first lit.
This was interpreted in contemporary accounts as God’s doing, and as only an earthly precursor to the suffering Keller the heretic would endure in hell. It seemed he hadn’t been merely unpopular so much as enthusiastically loathed. In the unlikely event that his trial had resulted in an acquittal, it was Juliet Harrington’s considered opinion that he would have been publicly lynched, torn limb from limb or trampled by an angry mob in the street.
There were parchment-covered notebooks in the archive and they were obviously incriminatory, because they were written in the style favoured at the time by men with rebellious intellects: in code. There was a sketch-book with larger pages and those pages were covered in diagrams and tables and mathematical calculations.
The biggest item was ledger-sized and about fifty pages long. It was handwritten in Latin and Paul Beck pored over it for about half an hour as Juliet sat beside him unwilling to interrupt his study or break his concentration.
Eventually he turned to her, closing the big, thick, leather-bound volume with a small, dusty thud. Everything in the room bar the archive was a pristine white – walls, floor, furniture. The air conditioning was a frigid hum. When Paul spoke, the acoustics made his voice crystalline. And it was ‘Paul’; he’d insisted in the café on Christian names, on an un-embassy-like absence of formal protocol. Juliet had liked him from the moment he spoke, insisting on buying her breakfast. ‘A big breakfast,’ he’d said. ‘I suspect we’re in for a long day. And we’ll need our brains on full alert. High stakes, right?’
‘I don’t think they could be any higher, Paul,’ she’d said.
His English was idiomatic, unaccented. She’d put this down to his linguistic expertise.
Now he said, ‘This is a sort of diary, or journal. I think the only reason it isn’t codified too is the word-volume. That sort of discretion with this quantity of material would have taken up too much of his time. So he took a risk with it, which is to our benefit. I can read this fluently and, if you like, I can read it aloud.’
Juliet nodded at the codified notebooks. ‘What about them?’
‘We’ll get to them. I’m quite good at code breaking. Not Bletchley Park standard, but not too shabby.’
‘You speak English perfectly.’
He grinned at that. ‘German national with an English mum. Contrary to Aryan mythology, it’s from her I got the blond hair and the blue eyes.’
‘And the code-breaking skills?’
‘A maternal grandmother who did work at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing quite rightly gets the plaudits, but most of the staff there were Oxbridge-educated women. Anyway, if I can’t crack Gunter Keller’s code, we’ve a specialist at the embassy who can. But one thing at a time, Juliet. Let’s start with the journal.’
Paul Beck was reminding Juliet Harrington powerfully of just how much she’d enjoyed the company of men before her marriage break-up disillusioned her. If his intellect was an asset, his looks were a terrific bonus. It was early days, obviously, but she liked his character too, the bit she’d so far got to know of it. There was bound to be a partner. Children too, probably, if he was straight. But the significant thing was that she thought he was someone she was going to enjoy working with.
‘He starts off in the spring of 1528, so a full two years before what you believe to be the publication date of the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom. He’s living in Hanover, struggling, he says, with poverty. He’s above the breadline, but not by much. He’s twenty-nine years old and claims to be working as an apothecary. But he wouldn’t admit to alchemy, because alchemy was stigmatized in that place and at that time as little better than witchcraft.
‘I’d say, judging from his grammar and vocabulary, that he’s self-educated. He’s intellectually arrogant and writes as if he believes the world owes him a living. Socially, with or without justification, he’s a snob. He makes no mention of women socially and comes across as fairly indifferent to your gender, so perhaps he’s asexual. Shall I begin?’
‘Be my guest,’ Juliet said, settling back into her white-painted hardwood chair.
FOURTEEN
Hanover, April 10, 1528
The commission comes from an English nobleman of financial means so vast they are almost incalculable. His interest in matters esoteric is already impressively learned for an amateur. His ambition, though, is quite breathtaking. He seeks to combine every proven magical rite, ritual and formula in a single volume. Such a book has never existed in the modern world. Not since ancient times, before the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, has the world been able to boast of anything approaching this. Not since Alexandria, or perhaps Thebes, has there existed such an ambitious accumulation of secret and powerful knowledge.
It is to be forged by several practitioners working as one, each of them eminent in his or her own right. I know all of them by reputation but for the English soothsayer Mary Nye. My new patron vouches for her personally, having availed himself twice of talents he insists are genuine.
The practice of magic exacts a heavy toll. There is a price to be paid for every successful spell. Man cannot confound the natural order without nature exacting a kind of revenge or retribution, sometimes with savage consequence. The more successful the magic, the greater the consequence, a paradox with which my noble new master is familiar.
When this almanac is completed, its power will be enormous. But that power will also be inert until its pages are put to practical use. I will endeavour to make it as potent as possible in the belief that it can fulfil my own secret and heartfelt ambition.
It is my gre
at desire to bring about the End Times. I wish to provoke the apocalypse. The Christian world perpetuates a cruel intellectual and physical tyranny I wish to see destroyed utterly. The triumph of Lucifer predicted in the Bible can be orchestrated, encouraged, brought about more swiftly than fate intends. If I succeed, mankind’s greatest achievement will be mine. And minds and spirits like my own will be ungoverned and free and, crucially, free of the fear that haunts and censors and persecutes us.
That sounds boastful, I know. But I speak as a man who five years ago defied mortality. I perfected a ritual in which the essence of a man – his spoor – can return him to life after death. I succeeded in doing this with a wealthy merchant, the recently drowned master of a Baltic fishing fleet. But he returned requiring a human host from which to feed. And he was able to summon his dead wife and brother, and even his dead son, out of the ground in a spectral contagion which outraged people and was described by them as a plague of the dead.
One by one, these mortal miracles which I had gifted with a second life were destroyed. For several months I was the subject of suspicion, of pointed fingers and barely veiled hostility. But when it was put to me that I had dabbled in the Devil’s work, I simply denied it and demanded that my accusers either desist or demonstrate proof. ‘Only God has the power to endow life,’ I said. ‘To suggest otherwise is blasphemy.’
And thus were my accusers silenced. For blasphemy is a grave offence which earns a brutal punishment.
I am not so boastful or deluded as to claim that the dead recalled by my ritual were perfect specimens. They came back with crude appetites. They had a rank odour about them no amount of bathing could sluice away. They could be cruel and furtive. They were greedy for the company of their own kind.
It was said by the people of my restored merchant’s village on the Baltic coast that they were like this because they possessed no souls. A nonsense, this, a belief no better than the crude witchcraft of charms and familiars. I am a scientist. If I push at the boundaries of the possible, it is because that is where my talents and inclinations lie. Without men like me in the world, there is no possibility of progress.
The biggest impediment to progress is the Church. It is the yoke which hinders scientific advancement. That magic can reduce it to ashes and unlamented memory is the great irony of our age. But it can be done. This book is my vehicle for bringing it about. There will never be a better opportunity.
There is much work to be done before its completion, of course. I must list and collate and continue to experiment. I am still accumulating knowledge, still working on perfecting my formulae and methodology. It will take at least a year to gather together everything I need to make my crucial, influential, perhaps defining contribution to this almanac, to this great and noble project.
My blue-blooded English patron has dispatched his emissary with the generous funds which will put paid in gold to this scrimping life I’ve wished so ardently, for so long, to escape entirely.
That wish is about to come true. Already, I am grateful and energized by this new direction and prosperity. It will enable me to buy the costly materials for my experimentation.
This changed state of affairs will not breed any carelessness in me. I very well appreciate that there are spies and informers everywhere and that I am already the subject of much suspicion. Everything must be done discreetly, even clandestinely. But secrecy is a habit I mastered a long time ago. Discretion to men like me is life and death. Sometimes I dream about the manacles glowing white hot around my burning wrists as the pyre rages with my poor body bound against the stake at its centre. It is not a fate I wish to encourage through arrogance or carelessness.
I am debating with myself whether to include my greatest scientific achievement in the almanac of which there is no doubt that I will be the principal architect. A part of me wishes to keep that knowledge for myself alone. But there is no question that if someone were actually to conjure what I conjured briefly just weeks ago, it would accelerate the process of bringing about the End Times.
The ritual itself is surprisingly simple. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that a child could do it. But a child could not undo it, as I managed to only after the most prodigious and exhausting struggle. Every ounce of my occult ingenuity was used in what our Arabian friends of a few centuries ago would have termed ‘putting the genie back into the bottle’. It was the most difficult experience I have ever undergone, and I believe it came close to costing me my life.
I created a creature from nothing. Unless I coaxed it out of the dreamscape, that abstract dimension that exists just beyond our five senses. But it was born with the most ferocious hunger, the most appalling appetite. And it grew with venomous speed.
Was it a monster, coaxed from our deepest common fears, made corporeal only by a combination of will and enchantment? Was it something transported from the stars by my spell? I do not know. I do know that I felt a shift, a shudder through the universe, in reaction to a man doing the business of a god. I might have felt the wrath of our Creator, scolded from the very Heavens for doing something no one human should. No matter. I am here to tell the tale.
I am to meet my new patron’s emissary in a few days, when he has crossed the German Sea carrying the purse he will present to me. The signal that he has arrived will be a small brass tack newly pressed into the wood of my front door. I am embarrassed about the hovel in which circumstance has obliged me to live and would rather he did not see it, even from the outside. I was reluctant to give my address to the baron in our clandestine correspondence. But how else will his man find me without the spies being party to our meeting?
On the evening of the day the tack is pressed home I am to meet this emissary at a tavern where neither of us is known. Care and discretion are essential in such matters. Greatness summons me. Perhaps a kind of immortality. On the one hand, that sounds like nothing more than the hot air of a braggart. On the other, thoughts like those are useful in giving me purpose and calming nerves the pointing fingers have left badly frayed.
FIFTEEN
Juliet’s mobile rang. Paul got up to get a drink from the water cooler in the corner. Her caller was the Home Secretary.
‘How are you getting on? Any progress?’
‘Not really. Gunter Keller really liked the sound of his own voice. A lot of hot air and bragging about one spell in particular that seems to have affronted nature.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He claims to have created a life. Sounds like he conjured something demonic.’
‘Things have rather escalated this morning, professor. The Foreign Secretary has gone public on a theory that the plague outbreak and the miasmic fog were deliberate acts of aggression carried out by a foreign power.’
‘Sounds a lot more plausible than the Almanac.’
‘That’s the problem. Despite zero evidence, it sounds extremely plausible.’
‘Which foreign power?’
‘I’m sure you can guess that without any hints from me.’
‘What’s been the reaction?’
‘Immediate and emphatic calls for retaliation. They’ve broken off diplomatic relations. A majority of the population here is extremely angry. The Americans have weighed in rather heavily. Two hundred and seventy of the three hundred and fifty fatalities when that aircraft obliterated the central section of the Thames Barrier were their citizens, eighty of them twelve-year-old children from a Chicago choir. Their parents are naturally anguished.’
‘Anything else?’
‘As it happens, yes. It’s raining here. Heavily. And we’re expecting the highest tide of the year. The army are sandbagging buildings. We look like we’re at war already, which we’re not, but no one is ruling out the possibility that we may be quite soon.’
‘If London floods, people can hardly blame the Russians.’
‘On the contrary. If it hadn’t been for the fog they’re being blamed for, we’d still have a flood barrier.’
For no
reason she could really have explained, Juliet then remembered the cold-calling Catholic priest, Father Thomas Gould. Perhaps she remembered him because just at that moment, it seemed a miracle was needed. And not a miracle like those of which Gunter Keller routinely boasted.
‘How are you getting along with our embassy Adonis?’
‘Companionably.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I’ll call you just as soon as we come across something of practical use.’
‘Practical magic,’ he said. ‘Not a phrase I ever thought I’d use.’
She ended the call. Paul was still over by the water cooler, sipping his second or third helping from a conical paper cup. They didn’t hold much and clearly reading aloud had made him thirsty. She told him about the escalation in London.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he dropped the cup into the pedal bin at his feet. He said, ‘Five hundred years after his grisly execution, Gunter Keller finally gets his apocalypse.’
‘Diplomacy has usually worked in the past.’
‘Not in 1914. And not in 1939. And they’ve all got bigger toys now to throw out of their prams.’
‘What are you making of Keller?’
‘Either seriously deluded, or very much the real deal. I’d bet there’s something in the chronicles about the plague of the dead in that Baltic village. That doesn’t sound like a bundle of laughs.’
‘For all his talk of caution, his occult dabbling was extremely reckless.’
‘Drunk on power?’
Juliet shook her head slowly. ‘His agenda,’ she said. ‘The greater the volatility, the more significant the reverberations, the closer he believed he got to triggering the End Times.’
‘And the Almanac is his best shot.’