The Auguries

by F. G. Cottam

  Andy had on his Mountain Warehouse waterproof boots. The weather was a good test for them, and as he walked to Pete’s he was gratified they were passing it. He only counted one or two pedestrians on the entire route. None of them police officers, which sort of proved his dad’s point. He’d heard on the news that most of the Met police force was deployed at the big shopping centres to prevent the looting epidemic that the flood was predicted to bring.

  It was all a bit biblical really. His dad had used a word over dinner the previous evening. ‘Apocalyptic,’ his dad had said and, impressed, Andy had asked his dad the word’s meaning.

  ‘Plagues and floods we can deal with, son,’ his dad had said. ‘The world’s a resilient place. Nuclear war, though, I’m rather less confident about.’

  He was there. He looked at the façade of the house. It was large, three storeys above the ground, three windows to each floor, altogether a much grander place than where Andy lived. There’d been no problem about Pete’s grandfather having the room to house his grandchildren. Just a problem, apparently, with things like soap and detergent and shoe polish and an ironing board. And Head & Shoulders shampoo for Sneaky Pete’s dandruff.

  Andy stood in the rain and studied the house, waiting for a curtain to twitch at one of the windows and give Dawn away, doing her creepy sentinel thing. But there was no movement at all. So he rang the bell, and when that didn’t summon anyone he knocked on the heavy brass knocker, which he noticed was badly tarnished. It wasn’t just Pete his grandpa neglected.

  And come to think of it, where was Pete’s grandpa? You got the sprightly pensioners and you got the ones who sat around looking unwell. And Pete’s grandfather was very much in the latter category. He’d been badly wounded serving at somewhere called Aden in the army about fifty years ago, according to Pete. He’d been an officer and when he’d been left with a limp they’d chucked him out.

  Andy retrieved Pete’s key from under its pink-painted rock. Andy had teased him that keeping your door key under a rock that colour was a bit girly, but Pete wasn’t the sort of character who let that kind of remark bother him in the slightest. He’d either laugh it off, or he’d retaliate with a crack of his own. Andy realized then, with a feeling of slight surprise, that he missed his friend. Of course he did; it was why he was there.

  With the key held between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, Andy gave the door knocker a final rat-tat-tat before transferring the key from his left hand to his right and letting himself in.

  Dawn hadn’t bothered emptying the fish tank in the kitchen. The ground floor of this house was spacious, with the kitchen at the back, and Andy could tell that from just inside the front door. The smell had grown both staler and stronger. He thought it strong enough now to permeate the fabric of soft furnishings and carpets. You might never completely get rid of it. It was almost strong enough to make you gag.

  He went through into the kitchen holding his breath. And he noticed two things straight away. The first was that the green water in the fish tank was moving, sort of rippling. The second was that the get-well card he’d bought for Pete, ripped into a dozen pieces, was in the waste-paper basket under the table.

  It had one of those black and white archive photos on its cover. A caption comically at odds with the image itself. It had cost him £2.75, and she had ripped it to spiteful shreds.

  Still holding his breath, red-faced he knew with the effort, Andy went over to the fish tank and saw that its contents seethed with life. Tiny terrapins, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, none bigger than his little fingernail and feasting on each other in a loathsome frenzy.

  Unable to hold his breath any longer, Andy gasped it out and then inhaled because his lungs weren’t giving him any choice. The stink assaulted his senses and he gagged and puked into the fish tank, adding his half-digested breakfast to the roiling mess in there.

  Andy heard that jackhammer boom from below then; ponderous, stolidly rhythmic, implausibly loud. And then it stopped. And he heard a bellow of raw fury that wasn’t at all a human sound. He fled the place, clawing at the front door in his blind panic to get out before the thing at the bottom of the steps to the basement got its strong and unshakeable grip on him.

  On the street outside, it was still raining hard. Harder, if anything. He trudged home through it, expecting at every turn to be confronted by a returning and indignant Dawn. But the library wasn’t even in the same direction as his home.

  He’d left no clue that he’d been there, apart from the puke, which the terrapins would nibble at with the same avid hunger with which they nibbled at one another. Andy thought he’d seen how extinction worked, and it had frightened him.

  Not to the same extent, though, that he was frightened of Dawn Jackson. He was beginning to think that she might have done some harm to Pete. The contempt with which she had discarded his get-well card pointed at someone not just callous, but deliberately nasty. Had she done something too to her grandfather?

  Wildly, for a moment, Andy thought about an anonymous call to the police. But it wouldn’t stay anonymous, would it? They’d had the technology to trace mobile calls to their numbers and locations for years. Even if he found a working payphone they’d get that number, and these days they could extract DNA. If Dawn was up to something, they’d want to find and question him. If Dawn was completely innocent, they’d want to find him and prosecute him for wasting police time.

  Andy didn’t want to speculate on what manner of beast lurked in the basement or the cellar of that house. He didn’t want to try to imagine the physical nature of the creature responsible for that monstrous sound he’d heard. All the way back home through the pouring rain he endured it again, playing on repeat in his head, as though he would be incapable now of ever forgetting it.

  He decided to detour to the library. He wanted to see his mum, wanted the reassurance of her smile as she ruffled his hair. Even the perfumed scent of her was a comfort to her son. But he stopped, dead in his tracks, half a block on. There was every chance that Dawn Jackson was swotting at a library table. And if she was, she would know. She’d subject him to one of her cool, appraising, green-eyed gazes and she’d know everything. Right down to the Alpen muesli and full-fat milk helping fill her fish tank, along with a sample of his stomach acid.

  EIGHTEEN

  Dawn had studied Malthusian theory as part of her Special Study Group economics lessons. She didn’t take to every historical figure but thought Thomas Malthus had expressed some very interesting ideas about population control, back at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

  It was the positive checks on population control Dawn particularly warmed to, and the fact that Malthus referred to them as positive at all. They included famine, disease and war and they kicked in when populations became too big for existing resources to sustain them.

  There was no famine in London currently, but an incidence of bubonic plague had probably got closer to epidemic proportions than anyone was prepared to admit. And the world seemed to be on the brink of full-scale war. Dawn knew this because she took the interest in world affairs that proved so emphatically that she wasn’t on any kind of spectrum, though her dead brother, when alive, had tediously insisted that she was.

  The Foreign Secretary had said that the recent fog had been chemically induced by agents of a hostile foreign power. He had pointed an accusatory finger at Russia and, to use a terrible pun, was sticking to his guns. The flood threat was a direct consequence of an aviation catastrophe that would not have occurred without the fog, so that was being blamed on Russia too. And the Russians were reacting with typical fury. Or untypical fury, because Dawn knew her twentieth-century history and didn’t think they had been this hot and bothered since the height of the Cold War. Maybe not even then. And at that time they hadn’t possessed anything like the inter-continental ballistic weapons that they did today.

  Her clever head was full of Malthus until the moment she got home. As soon as she opened the door, she
knew someone had been there. It was only an intuition, no evidence to support the belief, but to Dawn it was a certainty. She wondered whether they were still there, down in the cellar partying with what was left of her brother, subject to his insatiable hunger and new-found passion for warm-blooded raw meat. Good luck to them, if they were.

  Dawn hadn’t been down to look, but didn’t think the lopping-off spell could have been wholly effective in depriving her brother of a head. He was still ambulatory, still roaring out the sort of occasional noises for which people depended on vocal chords and still, presumably, eating from Grandpa’s stockpile of cans of vile food – his corned beef, his boiled ham, his Spam and bloody pilchards. Revolting sardines with a key that rolled back the lid. Only stale, flat bitter lemon to drink. But then beggars couldn’t be choosers, could they?

  The terrapin explosion pleased Dawn as much as it had distressed Handy Andy. Like him, she thought it looked like a world on its way to extinction in microcosm, which was a word Dawn knew and Andy didn’t. But the sight delighted rather than repelling her and she was growing accustomed to the smell. The smell was, to her, just the olfactory equivalent of an acquired taste. She thought there was a Malthusian character to the squirming mass of tiny creatures as they busily devoured one another. There were too many and they were demonstrating population control in a positive manner.

  She didn’t honestly know how they’d been spawned. She knew vaguely that terrapins usually came into the world as eggs. These hadn’t, they’d appeared spontaneously. They were an approximation of terrapins rather than the real things, created by magic, she thought, more than by nature. Provoked by magic. This signified that she wasn’t fully in control of the magic. Unless there was a spontaneous quality to it, a sort of life of its own she’d sparked unintentionally.

  She couldn’t honestly devote the necessary degree of thought to what the terrapin explosion implied. Chaos? Confusion? Anarchy? She still had tests to revise for and they were currently at the forefront of her bright and energetic mind. If the avid little amphibians got bigger, she’d just perform the vanishing spell that had worked so well on their predecessor. And then she’d have the fish tank vanish too.

  A thought occurred to Dawn. She walked back through the house and out of the front door, leaving it ajar behind her. She lifted the pink pebble under which she knew her dead brother’s front door key should have reposed. It wasn’t there. Someone had done the vanishing spell on it. Except that no one but she was capable of real magic, because she was the only person with the book. So not magic, but basic, bland, earthly mischief.

  ‘Handy Andy Baxter,’ Dawn said, aloud. She smiled at the thought that he would have seen his carefully chosen, affectionately written card torn up in the kitchen waste bin. When school started again, he might mention her brother’s continued absence to a teacher; reminding them, stirring up fresh trouble for her. And a visit from the truancy officer would be a disaster. She might have to have another diversionary incident where a teacher died in their sleep. Someone as popular generally as the late and much lamented Mrs Mahoney had been. Or someone with a crucial role like the head of year or the headmaster.

  Handy Andy she would deal with at her leisure. Dawn considered retribution a very satisfying activity for which she was proving to have a real and growing talent, thanks to her possession of the spell book. The revision was a bit of an intermission in her personal and private magic show, but there would be a second act. And she was aware of the old saying that revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

  She looked up at the sky, blinking through persistent rain. She didn’t think it would flood in her grandpa’s part of town. Their house was in Crouch End, which was hilly, and they were at an address a substantial distance above sea level. And she was confident that the way she’d wrapped it would protect the book against damp, safeguard it against the seepage of rain through the turf of the garden.

  She went and looked out of the kitchen window at the lawn. The depression at the spot where she had dug was so slight it hadn’t even puddled. Unless you knew it was there, you really wouldn’t notice it. She thought her secret completely secure and safe.

  Well, one of her secrets, she conceded to herself, with a resigned sigh. The other secret, the one in the cellar, needed checking on.

  She wouldn’t do that personally. It was just too dangerous after the way Pete had moved when he’d bitten her. It had been a cobra strike of suddenness and cold savagery and speed. She was not a match for him physically and didn’t want to risk another attack. But her study of the spell book had provided her with another way.

  In the book it required an incantation and then a camera obscura kind of arrangement involving a box with a pinprick at its centre. This tiny light source projected the image you wanted to see on to a screen or wall. Except that Dawn wouldn’t do it like that. She didn’t see the need for the obsolete technology. She had too much faith in the potency of the magic. She would incant what she’d learned by heart with her mind intent on those Latin words and their charged meaning, their occult power. Then she’d switch on the television and see what resulted.

  She pressed the change-channel button nine times before she recognized her grandfather’s cellar. The light wasn’t very good. Discarded empty meat and fish cans littered the floor, glimmering slightly in what scant illumination there was.

  Her dead brother was a large, still shape slumped darkly in one corner, breathing audibly in big, gusty lungfuls of the cellar’s dank air, crooning softly to himself.

  Then he seemed to sense this fresh scrutiny. He tensed, his whole body taking on a coiled posture, as though ready to pounce. He sprang up abruptly and scuttled forward into close-up.

  He still had his head. An ear and an eye were missing, and his skull had taken on a sort of concave look, but it was still there on his shoulders. And something had happened to his mouth. It was shaped in a leer stretched across the whole bottom half of his face and barbed, crowded, with an array of sharp and uneven teeth. More of a maw than a mouth. It reminded her of a shark.

  ‘You’re a dentist’s nightmare, bro,’ Dawn said quietly at the screen. But what she truthfully thought was that he was a nightmare altogether. She’d misused the lopping-off spell. It was meant only for hands and feet. These fresh deformities were the consequence.

  She’d taken further precautions with the cellar door. It was strengthened and welded shut by thought spells she believed made the cellar itself inescapable. One extra-strength Nurofen had sorted out the resulting headache. But eventually she’d have to do something about Pete. There was some sort of contamination at work there. He was changing, transforming, degenerating into a monster. The truth was, he was already a monster.

  But it was a problem really for another day. Revision beckoned. Dawn liked an academic challenge and was aiming eventually for straight As in her grades. She switched off the television and the thing her brother had become vanished from the screen and from her mind. She went to fetch her textbooks.

  NINETEEN

  September 1, 1528

  I have spent almost the whole of the last month languishing in a prison cell, the victim of rumour and innuendo, put to the torture with heated irons and the rack, stewing in the heat of the height of summer in a stinking cell with a bed of straw to sleep on, deprived of materials with which to write or even a solitary book to divert me from discomfort and severe pain and constant, gnawing hunger. The only blessing is that I retain my sanity. And that I have had a month to reflect in the abstract on the Almanac, the shape it will take and what steps to take to render it ineffective should it fall into the wrong hands.

  A malicious neighbour must have informed on me to the authorities. Suspicions, rather than anything resembling hard evidence of occult practice. Proof would have sent me to the gallows, at best.

  The burghers of the city sent pike-men to my handsome new lodgings in the small hours at the beginning of August. Perhaps my new-found material wealth was the spur. Gains are alw
ays ill-gotten in the minds of the envious. I was questioned by candlelight at an ungodly hour, still in my night-shirt. My inquisitors were masked to conceal their identities, I suspect for fear of occult reprisal should my rumoured powers prove real and authentic.

  ‘You do the Devil’s work, apothecary.’

  ‘My calling is medicinal.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘An unsupportable accusation.’

  ‘Unless we force you to confess.’

  And so on. Mary Nye is here, dispatched by my English lord to lodgings not half a mile away. A mixed blessing. On the one hand she represents a risk; on the other, her poultices have eased the pain searing my joints. I have enjoyed the nourishment of her fortifying cordials. We shared a discussion about pain generally. She has the power to put an end to physical discomfort entirely but has also a reluctance to use it.

  ‘It seems futile, mistress, to harbour power you choose to ignore,’ I remarked.

  ‘If pain were an end in itself, sir, I would not hesitate.’

  ‘What is pain, if not a conclusion or result?’

  ‘It is a warning. Pain chastises us for our carelessness. It signals illnesses for which we summon physicians. To be without it is extremely dangerous.’

  I had not expected philosophizing from a woman so unprepossessing in manner and drab in appearance as she. But her salves were effective enough.

  I asked her about the second sight. She cannot see her own future, which is veiled to her. So I asked her if she would kindly look into mine. She sat opposite me and concentrated on a small mirror shard she uses for the purpose. Then she turned pale and winced, which did not seem to me a welcome indication.