by F. G. Cottam
Is there a grubbier vocation than occult tinkering with the natural order? I think not. Yet Keller carried himself in the manner of someone high-born or eminent in some professorial capacity. And yet there was something so threatening about his presence that I found myself fingering the pommel of my sword as though to draw the weapon simply in self-protection.
I should add that I had ordered captain and crew ashore armed with funds ample even for thirsty sailors in order that they might get extravagantly drunk and afterwards find berths for the night on shore. I wanted no witnesses to this godless encounter of ours. I did not want to be there myself; it was only on the king’s commission that I was submitting myself to a single moment of this unsavoury ordeal.
Despite all that, I made Keller a welcome guest aboard the vessel. I invited him into my absent captain’s cabin and provided him with bread and cheese to eat and wine to drink with it. He ate and drank voraciously and with the table manners of a pig. I confess I was unsurprised by this, which made it easier to mask my disdain for my uncouth guest’s miserable habits.
I had opened a second bottle of wine for him when I said, ‘It seems to be taking rather a long time to compile this Almanac.’
‘And Rome was not built in a day,’ he said, chewing.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Some of the spells need refinement. Some of them need to be evolved, tailored. It is a long and complex process. It has inherent dangers. Some of it is a matter of trial and error. Risks are being taken on your behalf by people who do not wish to die before they can spend their share of the money you are paying them.’
‘Much of what you are saying is simply incomprehensible.’
He drank and belched and fixed me with his baleful stare. He said, ‘Most practitioners of magic, the serious practitioners, have some occult talent. Either they were born with it, or they have struck a hard bargain with fearful consequences.’
‘A deal with the Devil?’
He grinned, showing me a mouthful of rotting teeth. ‘Exactly that,’ he said.
‘I qualify on neither count,’ I said.
‘And yet you seek occult power. That is why the Almanac is such a challenge. And that is why the spells described on its pages require the refinement they do. They must work for an amateur. It is not impossible, but it will take time.’
‘How much longer?’
He reached for a rind of cheese and tore a strip from it and put it into his mouth and chewed, thinking carefully. And I thought, this at least is impressive. He is taking the task set him and his acolytes very seriously indeed.
He said, ‘All of next year. We have a timetable. We correspond and, when we can, we meet. By the spring or summer of 1530, we will be ready for the final distillation of what we have achieved. We will gather then to collaborate in person and you will have your Almanac, I swear it.’
‘Is gathering in person not a risk?’
‘Everything concerned with what we do is a risk. But we will unite in London. And only one of us is a native of England. Only one of our number is recognizable to the authorities. And you will find us an address at which we can work discreetly. Your wealth will safeguard and insulate us. We will enjoy privacy. Your gold will keep us all from harm.’
I must have looked dubious. Keller said, ‘What?’
‘I have yet to see a demonstration of these powers you speak of so assuredly. The man who sits before me pisses and farts. You could not save yourself from the smallpox.’
‘I was six years old.’
‘You cannot keep your own teeth in your skull. Or not for many years longer, I warrant.’
At this, he looked furious. Then petulant. And then his expression changed to one of resolution. ‘Come with me, sir,’ he said.
I followed him on to the deck. A light rain was falling. The chop of the sea, the hiss of lantern wicks, the emptiness of the night water surrounded us; the planks of the deck, slippery now, become treacherous beneath our feet. Once more the fingers of my sword hand caressed its silver pommel. I was as a little girl, seeking the reassurance of her painted wooden doll, hugging it to her chest.
Gunter Keller closed his eyes. He began to mutter in a language new and alien to my ears. He folded his hands in a series of complex gestures that seemed entirely meaningless. In that moment, I was certain he was nothing more than a glib charlatan, a mountebank and a thief.
Suddenly, a few feet away from the starboard side of the ship, the sea began to foam and bubble and hiss, as though tormented at the spot. Then something was spewed, writhing, from the depths and into sight, bursting, rising, flung on to the deck before us with a loud and fleshy thud. There it continued to twist and churn, its eight suckered tentacles finding no purchase, its one eye opaque and expressionless, its beaked maw opening and closing with an audible chitter as the creature drowned in air.
‘Can you put it back?’
‘You put it back,’ Keller said, or rather whined, peevishly. ‘I’m tired. You have dragged me all the way to the coast of France, only to insult me with your foolish scepticism. I am Gunter Keller. I am the greatest magician in Europe. It is within my power to return a man from the dead.’
‘Yet you can do nothing about the carrion stink of your own poisonous breath.’
He stared at me. His eyes swelled in their sockets. Or they seemed to. He waved vaguely at what surrounded us. ‘I could put you down there on the bed of the sea. I could do that with a thought.’
The insight occurred to me suddenly then that Keller’s collaboration with his fellow compilers of the Almanac had increased his own powers greatly, as though magic was itself a contagion. He was boasting of a trick only recently acquired, I was sure.
But could he summon himself back from the dead? I very much doubted that. And never has the temptation to run a man through been stronger in me than at that moment. I could – and perhaps should – have unsheathed my sword and simply skewered him. Never have I stood before a man more deserving of that grisly finality. He had usurped nature, had undermined what was sane with this godless perversion I had just witnessed. But of course, I did not do the world the favour of killing him. Instead I pulled on my gauntlets and lifted the stinking creature by two of its boneless, suckered limbs and flung it over the side back into the sea.
I had my proof, I suppose. After his welcome departure a few minutes later, I wondered which of the two alternatives was true of Keller. Was he born with occult powers to refine and perfect, or had he struck a bargain with the demon who rules Hell?
Despite my colourful new reputation, I am in truth no betting man. But if I were, my money would be firmly on the latter proposition. I do not for a single moment believe I would lose it.
I recall a recent conversation with the king. I asked him whether it would not be better to leave these meddlers with human destinies to their earthly corruption and let them reap their inevitable fate of damnation when judged after their departure from life. He was adamant, stubborn, even defiant in the face of my tactful suggestion that it might be healthier to pursue this scheme no further.
‘What do you seek to gain from it, sire?’
‘An accord with King Francis,’ he said. But there was something of the rote in that reply and so I pressed him further.
‘Nothing more?’
‘I want what you already possess, Fleury,’ he said. ‘I hope to earn sufficient of God’s grace to have him grant the one entreaty that is the subject of my daily prayers.’
‘And what is that, sire?’ I asked him. But by then I knew the answer.
He looked me in the eye. He said, ‘I want a legitimate heir. I want a healthy male boy to be born to me in wedlock. I want nothing else so much in life as to father our future king.’
He seeks the routine miracle that delivered me my own beloved sons. That is something I can appreciate entirely in commoner or king, with all my heart and soul.
THIRTY-FIVE
The pounding on the cellar door began early in
the afternoon. Dawn thought it more determined than ever before. Her dead brother, Peter, was growing stronger all the time. He was hungry, probably ravenous. She felt her arm tingle at the memory of pain where he had taken the chunk of flesh out of her bicep with that lightning cobra strike with his teeth. She remembered the exultant look on his contorted features as he’d subsequently swallowed a piece of her.
The noise was thunderously rhythmic, as though some heavy metal drummer sat demented at his kit, amp cranked all the way up, hitting hard enough to break the skins, playing at some vast venue in front of thousands. Except of course that the reality was much more ominous and alarming than that.
She did not know how long the spell that had strengthened the door would hold for. The magic seemed to wax and wane a bit in a way that made it sometimes unpredictable, not wholly reliable. She decided that she would put on the Pete channel and take stock of exactly what it was she was now up against.
He was almost at the height of the cellar’s ceiling. That was about eight feet. His left arm had grown back but had not exactly been restored. Proportionally, it was about the same length as the original limb. But it was scaly and sort of crescent-shaped. He was using it as a club to beat the door, the obstacle to his freedom. Studying it, Dawn realized with a feeling somewhere between shock and dread that it was just like the fin of a terrapin, only swollen to giant dimensions.
How long did she have before he battered his way out and ascended the stairs to devour her?
She didn’t think she had very long at all. Dawn tried to calm her juddering heart by breathing deeply and counting to ten, knowing that only the displacement spell could offer her anything close to permanent safety from the monster her dead brother had over the passing days become.
She had read about the Mariana Trench in geography. It was the deepest place on the planet at the section called the Challenger Deep at 11,000 metres. It was in the Pacific Ocean at a point equidistant between the Philippines and Japan. You could place Mount Everest in the trench and its peak would still be two kilometres below the surface. It was an unimaginable depth. The pressure down there would be colossal, many tons per square inch. Not even the thing her brother had evolved into could tolerate that. It would crush him completely.
But Dawn couldn’t risk it. If she displaced something half way around the world, there would be consequences. Reverberations. Ramifications. Things might get very serious indeed as a result of invoking magic on that enormous scale. She might not survive it personally. The headaches had worsened; the fatigue was now set deep in her bones and, without stepping on the bathroom scales, she knew she’d lost weight. The clothing had grown loose on her diminished frame.
So where should she send him, when all her screaming senses told her there really wasn’t very much time to ponder on the question?
She decided she would aim for something more modest. A crevasse at a remote spot in the high Alps would suit her purposes. If Peter ever got out – which he wouldn’t, because he had no climbing gear or climbing experience – he would be a perfect candidate for the role of the Abominable Snowman. But he wouldn’t get out, would he? And eventually he would freeze or starve to death. His second death. Slower and more predictable than his first.
Displacement that distance was a four-extra-strength-paracetamol spell, probably requiring two Naproxen and an exhausted sleep to follow. But Dawn didn’t feel she had any choice whatsoever. The hammering at the cellar door, the fate it signified for her, was too much for her reasonably to bear. She felt cornered, forced to act. Just for a moment she saw a snapshot in her mind of the boy her twin had been: innocent, religiously devout, gentle, generous, a bit scruffy after the death of their mum and dad, loyal, loving.
She closed her eyes and emptied her mind. Then she visualized her dead brother’s remote and inhospitable new home. She wasn’t imagining this, she saw it, as an eagle might soaring above the mountains: a glittering abyss of snow and ice stretching down for hundreds, perhaps thousands of feet into pitch darkness.
She said the words. Recited them without pause in a clear, strong, unhesitating tone. The hammering beneath her all at once ceased. The sudden silence was blessedly complete. She was aware of a smell a bit like that when a fuse box blows, the air charged with energy, burned by it, atoms in flux, particles shifted in a manner that defied what was supposed to be possible.
Dawn smelled something else, something coppery; blood was pooling on her shirt from her nose, which was bleeding freely. Always a practical person, she went to get a towel from the bathroom to use as a cold compress. She didn’t in the slightest mind the sight of blood, and nosebleeds – while messy – didn’t hurt at all. Unlike her head, which was pounding as a consequence of the effort used to effect the spell successfully.
And it had been successful. She’d experienced a sort of after-image, had felt the thing that used to be Pete groping around in the icy darkness, trying and failing to lever himself up with his one good arm and that grotesque fin thing in the profound cold at the bottom of his crevasse. His new home. His lair. His prison and, over time, his tomb.
Once the bleeding had stopped and she’d swallowed a few pills, Dawn went outside for some fresh air. She felt a bit guilty, not about what she’d done, but about what would now happen as the fallout from working so potent a spell. The garden was gloomy, devoid of light. Black clouds, Dawn thought absently, blinking and then tilting her head upward at the sky. But it wasn’t cloud cover blocking the strength and brightness of the June sun. Instead, the sky was black with birds, filled with everything in the world capable of flight, it seemed, feathers spiralling down as their wings rubbed and collided in the dense, jostling air.
‘An augury,’ Dawn said out loud. ‘Now we’re for it.’
She spent an apprehensive hour before putting on the television. On the news channel several huge churches were shown on fire in London. Then the voiceover informed Dawn that the burning buildings were not churches but cathedrals. She recognized two of them as the bulletin progressed. They were St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Cathedral, and they didn’t look as if they were going to survive the ferocious blazes that had taken hold.
The cathedral fires had apparently started spontaneously with worshippers in their pews and tourists in their aisles. Not many people had managed to get out. Those who had said the fires all started the same way. The tabernacles on the high altars had burst open and tongues of fire had billowed out.
‘Like a ferocious dragon exhaling,’ said one soot-blackened boy survivor Dawn took to be a Game of Thrones fan.
The cathedrals had been full. They had survived the flood and the quake, and those people tenacious or just stubborn enough to remain in the erstwhile capital had taken this to be a sign. Prayer had become popular as the political crisis deepened. Natural disaster and the threat of war made people think about mortality and their own spiritual welfare.
Or so the commentator was saying.
Dawn now knew a bit about spiritual welfare, thanks to Father Gould. She’d liked the old priest. She’d have worked the lullaby spell on him so that he could be that little bit closer to his God than he was currently, but she didn’t have a photo of him and doubted very much that he was on Facebook.
She wondered what kind of tourist would still come to London after its litany of recent catastrophes. Then she remembered that the passenger planes were still grounded. They were people who couldn’t get home, making the best of things. And experiencing the worst.
She was sadder about the buildings than she was about the human victims. Compassion fatigue had set in for Dawn, where the human cost of these apocalyptic events was concerned. She’d just seen too many bodies in news footage floating in the river, battered by falling debris in the streets, bulldozed into those fetid piles on corners now being blamed for the typhus outbreak.
She felt saddest of all about St Paul’s. She’d been there on a school trip. She wasn’t personally a religious girl, but she knew the cathedra
l’s long history, knew it had defied the bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe in the London Blitz. And she’d thought its giant organ pipes cool and the Whispering Gallery, with its strange dome-inspired acoustics, even cooler.
She watched now as that great dome collapsed in on itself with an audible whoosh that became an ominous rumble and had the firefighters all around the building fleeing for their lives on the screen like so many scurrying ants.
Dawn surprised herself by shedding a tear. For nearly eighty years, since the autumn of 1940, St Paul’s Cathedral had been a proud symbol of British resistance. Now it had gone, was just ashes and rubble, its lovely white stone scorched black, its great pillared portico no more than a memory.
From what the pundits were saying on the TV, there was currently precious little resistance either. The mood in the former capital, they were saying, was now one of abject despair.
THIRTY-SIX
His name was Daniel Carter. He was thirty-six years old and had been attached to the British Embassy in Paris for four of the most recent of those years. He was Dan to his friends, one of whom was embassy colleague Paul Beck. They played one another at tennis. Parisian clay, which Dan joked put him at a handicap because he was a Brit and preferred the grass. They played on the same five-a-side football team in the overseas league.
Dan’s background was military; he’d served in the SAS in Afghanistan and Iraq. His most recent military deployment had been in London when the domestic terror threat got cranked up so high that SAS soldiers were deployed as armed officers wearing Met Police uniforms and insignia. The press and public had begun to comment on how lithe and agile these armed response officers appeared, how comfortably they handled their serious assault weapons. Dan had thought this covert deployment probably as open a secret as secrets ever got.
But now he was a civilian with a fairly vague and ambiguous job description working in, though more often out of, the British Embassy in Paris. He did quite a bit of liaison work with the French security forces. Officially, he was a minor diplomat usefully fluent in the language of the country to which he had been posted. Unofficially, what earned him his salary was playing an important link role in a complex but generally effective counter-terror network.