by John Shirley
“I acknowledge you, Missus,” Bosky said, “and I’ll acknowledge you whenever you like, if you’ll help us! You don’t seem like no demon, and it’s demons who’re keeping us here, and culling us out like fat sheep to become mutton—and we’ve got no wish to be mutton! Anything you can do, it’d be brill!”
Then approach, child, and take the arrows of metal in your hand . . . and lower your hand here, into my bosom . . .
Arrows? Bosky reckoned she meant the bullets. He poured a handful of rifle bullets from the little cardboard box into his palm, came closer to the baptismal and, after a moment’s hesitation—afraid she was going to do something wickedly witchy to him when he touched the water—he lowered his hand, bullets and all, into the water.
The font began once more to seethe, and he thought he felt something vibrating between the bullets.
Enough. It is done. The other arrows now . . .
When all the bullets were bathed, and when, as an afterthought, Garth had dipped his pocketknife in the shimmering water, Bosky turned to the baptismal and said, “Lady, are you a saint? The vicar’d be pleased was I to tell him your name! You the Madonna, then? The Virgin Mary?”
He thought for a moment that the beautiful face in the font rolled her eyes. No, child. I am the queen of all waters. Call me the Lady of Waters. Know that I am here to help you—for your enemy is mine. My power is limited in the depths of his realm, but I can strike at his minions through you, and through the other one I’ve sent to help you. Look for the man with the sad eyes, the bitter mouth, the long coat, in the dark places, where the Palace of Phosphor shines like dark deeds in the eyes of the Reckoner.
The water seethed once more and then settled, all at once, as if oil had been poured on it. The baptismal was empty of anything but water and the hint of a perfume, a scent both rank and sweet, a smell of slow green rivers, algaed ponds, brine, and water lilies.
“Well now, could be something will come of all this after all,” said Bosky’s granddad, leading the way out into the cracked and buckled street. They started toward the nearest edge of town and they were nearly there when Bosky’s mother caught up to them.
“Uh-oh,” Garth said. “Better let me handle this, lad. Ah, Maureen, my darling-dear, just you wait at home, the boy and I are off; we’re going hunting! We will need meat, you know!”
She came puffing up, red-faced from running; a compact little woman, but shapely, with flashing green eyes, wavy shoulder-length auburn hair, a spray of freckles. Her mother, Garth’s beloved Aileen, had been Irish: a strange, dreamy woman, afflicted with the second sight, who’d seen her own death a year in advance. “Oh I’m not to run in these shoes and you’re making me do it, Da!” Maureen cried. “And you’re not to lie to me any longer! Hunting! The vicar told me what you’re about, when I’d shaken him enough to get him to stop his blubbering! Hunting demons!”
“That’s hunting too, innit, Maureen?” Garth suggested feebly.
“Mum, we’re going after Geoff! Those things have taken him and I’ve had enough of sitting here, waiting for them to squeeze us and see who’s right for the meat table!”
“What? You don’t know that’s what happens to people they take!” She looked nervously at the ceiling, swiping a damp strand of hair out of her eyes. “Oh Da, is all this real?”
Garth shrugged. “I reckon it’s real if death is real. I buried more than one who died in the great shaking when we came down.”
“Mum, an angel has helped us. She’s put a blessing on our weapons!”
“A what?” She looked at him closely.
“A lady who appeared in the baptismal font—she said she was the Lady of Waters!”
“Did she . . .” Her voice matched the softness, the distance in her eyes. “The Lady of Waters?”
Bosky expected her to tell him he was mad, ask if he’d been smoking greens. But she just gave a brisk nod and hugged him, kissing him on the cheek. She drew back and looked at him, smoothing his hair, and said, “The Lady of Waters was better known to people once, and she’s always about somewhere. I’ve heard her singing at times, down by the river. Well then—I’m coming with you and Da too. Anything to keep busy . . . to do something about this.”
“No, Mum, I want to think of you being back here, safe—or safer, any gate. Right? Listen, there is something you can do. I was passing the house where those Pakis live—”
“I’ve told you, you’re not to speak of people like that, Boswell!”
“Right, well, they’re from Paki-stan ain’t they? Anyway, the father’s gone, the woman has six kids about her, she’s half out of her mind—you could talk to her, help her keep the kids busy. See to the other children in town.”
She crossed her arms on her chest and looked at him curiously, her head cocked to one side, and a slow smile climbed her full lips. “I don’t know when last I heard you speak so much sense before. When things were hard, your father would always rally just like that.” Her eyes filled with tears and she bit her lip, glancing at Garth.
Bosky knew what she was thinking: . . . rally just like that and put the bottle down.
But he hadn’t put it down for good and it had got him in the end anyway. He shrugged. “I just know, Mum, I have to find out what this is about. And maybe . . .”
He turned and looked at the dark wall, pocked with mist-shrouded caves, at the edge of town.
Maybe, if I live long enough, I’ll have an adventure.
“Right,” Maureen said. She kissed Garth on the cheek, squeezed Bosky’s shoulder just once, and turned decisively away, walking slowly back up the street, toward the house where the Pakistani family lived. Bosky watched her go for a few long moments, wondering if he’d ever see her again. “Granddad . . . What did she mean, she’s heard the Lady of Waters talking? Is she . . . Is all this too much for her?”
“Oh no, if your mum said she heard the Lady, then she did, right enough. Your mum’s own mother was fey, some say.”
“Fey? What’s that? Like gay? You’re saying me Mum’s a lesbian?”
“Christ, no. It means they have the sight. And those who’re fey got the sight from the world of faerie. From the invisible ones—the fairies, the spirits of the elements, all those. Long ago some intermarried with mortals, they say, and your grandmother, I’ve always thought, got some of that blood, and passed it on to your mum.”
“Fairies! Go on with you, Granddad!”
“Are you going to sneer in that disrespectful way, after what we saw in the chapel?”
Bosky remembered the lady in the font. And all that had happened to the village. And his mother had always had her odd moments, when she seemed to be listening to things other people couldn’t hear. “All right, then, me mum’s fey. Right: I’m off. If you’re coming, come on.”
“One thing first, boy.”
“What’s that?”
“Load the rifle.”
Bosky swallowed, then nodded, took out some bullets and loaded the gun.
Then he shouldered his rifle once more, and he and his granddad headed for the darkness at the edge of town.
~
Sitting in deep darkness, unseen enemies somewhere near at hand, Constantine found himself having to smother laughter. It was the laughter of a man on the teetering edge of madness, certainly, and it would come pealing out of him shrill and giddy if he didn’t muffle it, and might get him torn to pieces.
Well here you are, mate, he thought. You let yourself sink into self-pity, and you followed the path of least resistance, letting an old man con you and a stream of water bully you, and you found your way to where you were heading all along: the pit. You’re at home in the pit, after all. What could be better, what could be more perfectly designed? It’s the very realization of your viewpoint on life. You were in an internal pit and you found an external one to wallow in. Brilliant!
He heard the creaking of the pulley, out of his reach in the deep shaft to one side of him, and he thought: Probably can’t get to it. Starve to death here just
out of reach of a way out. Your own private dark little crypt thousands of feet underground, the energies of the Hidden World humming in the stone. You chose your own world—your dingy little corner of the Hidden World, John. Truth is, you’ve always been here. Everything till now was a dream—maybe someone else’s. Maybe you were someone’s nightmare, mate. And now they’ve woken up, and you’re back down in your hole underneath old Britain, where nightmares go to wait till they’re called again.
He barked a laugh at that, and then clapped his hand over his mouth.
Quiet, you fool. Sod your solipsistic little fantasy—Chas’s life’s at stake. Maybe a lot more. But Chas is enough—he stood by you a dozen times and more. Find your way out of this fugue, this hole, or she’ll make him suffer for eternity. Endlessly drowning.
Christ I want a smoke. But light one and they’ll see the light and come crawling to pull you into wiggling pieces.
Come on, John. Either throw yourself headfirst down that shaft or pull yourself together, you tosser.
Constantine sat up on the stone floor, straightening his back and arranging himself in the posture of meditation. He contained his attention, turned it inward, and became aware of his breathing, the beating of his heart, the weight of his body; the present moment, to the sensations of his inner world.
The self-lacerating anger sprang into relief inside him. He saw it as a thing, like a cobra in a basket, swaying, hissing . . . venomous.
A moment before, he’d been that cobra. Seeing it, sensing it, he was outside it; he no longer was the cobra, was no longer identified with the anger. He sustained his state of inner concentration for a while, feeling his energy drain out of anger, out of meaningless tension, back into his inner reservoir of prana. When it had built up enough, he extended the field of his psychic attention outward, into the shaft nearby.
Prescience returned an image to him: a double length of chain hung there, swaying slightly. It began to move, one of the chains clinking and rising, the other descending, as something was lowered into the shaft.
On a platform attached to one of the chains was a bundled figure—a human being, a male, hands tied behind him. Someone young, Constantine thought. He was still a bit above.
“Hey, you on the platform!” Constantine called out, in a carrying whisper. “If you get to the bottom of that shaft you’ll be done for! Push on the chain, get it swinging toward me!”
“Who the bleedin’—?” A boyish voice.
“Just shut up and do it, you git! Quick! Rock the thing back and forth!” But then what? Constantine moved to the edge of the shaft, felt along the rough edge of the diamond-shaped hole in the wall, and found a spur of stone sticking out, partway down. That might do . . .
The youth was swinging the platform near now, and he was almost level with the hole in the wall. Constantine was losing his prescient image of him, but he could hear the chain’s swishing, clinking near, and in the faint light from above he could make out a shape swinging against the darker background of the shaft. Holding on to the stone edge of the hole in the wall, Constantine leaned out and swiped his arm through the air. His fingers slapped into the thick chain links, and he grabbed and pulled the chain toward him, grimacing with pain from the weight. “You can just see me, kid! Jump for the floor here, to my right!”
The kid jumped, stumbled, and started to fall back into the shaft. Bracing, Constantine let go of the chain and pulled the youth close. The boy got his footing as the chain swung like a pendulum across the shaft, then back toward them. Constantine once more grabbed it, and this time he pulled with all his might, drawing it closer, and, grunting, managed to wind it around the spur of stone on the broken edge of the hole. The chain continued to lower, rattling around the spur and back down the shaft. “Turn around, boy, let me get at your bonds.”
The teen mutely did as he was told and Constantine found what felt like copper wires twisted around his slender wrists. A few experimental twists . . .
“Oh, you’re pinching! The other way!”
“Stop whingeing, boy!” Constantine twisted the wire the other way and got it loose.
“Right, now we’ve got to figure out how to get up this thing.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s John.”
“Well I’m Geoff, but ‘my name’s John’ doesn’t explain much—”
“Just help me pull in the platform. It’s going back up.”
“I don’t want to go back up! There’s things up there!”
“There’s worse down here! Come on!”
Constantine and Geoff pulled the little platform close and when it started back up again they climbed onto it, swinging out into the open shaft, holding on to the chain, nearly losing their grip but clinging desperately. It swung sickeningly back and forth, clacking on the walls of the shaft, and then steadied, beginning to carry them slowly upward.
“You don’t get it,” Geoff said. “There’s things going to be waiting up there. When we get there, they’ll do something bad to us—something real bad.”
“Right. But maybe when you get high enough there’s some other place to get off. The gripplers unload it at the bottom and we’re some distance above them. The others won’t be looking for visitors from below.”
The platform was cranked up a long, inestimable way, before the light began to increase, and it grew only slightly, with a thin ray of blue-white sharing a hole in the shaft’s ceiling with the chains. There was just room for the platform to fit through the hole . . .
“Look!” the boy said, pointing. There was a rusty, old, wrought-iron maintenance catwalk running across the shaft close below the ceiling. They jumped onto it, Geoff first. It creaked but held, and they crept across to a shelf along the edge on the left side, under a great slowly turning gear of rusty iron.
“Feel like a bloody mouse in a grandfather clock,” Constantine muttered, lighting a Silk Cut and sitting under the big, slowly grinding gear. He needed a breather. He sat there, looking at Geoff and smoking, waiting for his heart to stop its pounding. Geoff had a mousy face, so it seemed to Constantine—or maybe it was the clock effect. He was about sixteen, and wore wire-rim glasses and the sloppy, oversized clothes teenagers affected now. Geoff sat beside him and put his hand out for a cigarette. “You’re too bloody young to smoke.” But Constantine lit another and gave it to him. This boy and he had saved each other’s lives after all, so it wouldn’t do to be poncey now. “Don’t be asking for a fag every two minutes. Or even every two hours.” His eyes adjusted and he could see that the iron teeth of the gear overhead interlocked with a larger gear half hidden in the shadows above. “A great bloody clock—or maybe a silent movie. Metropolis. Still, it’s a relief to have a little light. I was giving myself a headache, seeing things without me eyes.”
“How’d you see without your eyes? Like—psychically? I was wondering how you’d seen me.”
“Yeah,” Constantine said, shrugging. “That’s more or less it.”
“So you’re some kind of psychic magician, then?”
“That’s the dead best definition I’ve heard of me in a while. It beats ‘sodding bastard’—what I usually get. The gripplers pull you out of that village Old Duff told me about, did they?”
“Yeah, they—oy, you know Old Duff! He’s trying to get help for us?”
“I’m afraid I’m all the cavalry you can count on, mate. And I’ve come without so much as a horse.”
“I’m sorry I made fun of Old Duff,” Geoff said, tapping his cigarette ash off onto the stone. “He tried to warn us.”
“The old geezer practically begs to be made fun of. Some may doubt it could be true, but I believe he drinks more than me.”
“We shouldn’t stay here. They’ll figure it out soon enough.”
Constantine nodded and got up. “Whoever does maintenance on this machinery will be along in time. That gear’s been greased not long ago, right enough. Come on, mate.”
They followed the shelf around a big colu
mn that stood parallel to the shaft they’d come up. The column creaked and rumbled with the turning of the gigantic hidden axle inside it. It was rotated, Constantine figured, by the crusted half-men, like the late Arfur, turning cranks in the eternally dark chamber far below. As they came around to the far side of the column from the down-shaft, the light grew, and Constantine thought he smelled something he’d given up hope of smelling again any time soon: food cooking. His stomach rumbled in response.
“You smell that?” Geoff whispered.
“Aye. Careful now—” They went on tiptoes, padding around the column—it was perhaps twenty yards in diameter—to an open space beyond. They peered around the curve of the column to see a gigantic man using a big silvery ladle to stir a four-foot-high cooking pot set into a glowing recess in the floor. As he stirred he rumbled a tune to himself, singing in some gutteral language Constantine had never heard.
“Stone me—look at the size of him!” Geoff whispered excitedly. “Must be close to eight feet high!” He was all of that, and barrel-chested and wide-shouldered too.
The stranger had a star-shaped mane of hair and beard; his hair stuck out in three distinct gray-white spikes above and to the sides of his head; his beard was double-spiked below. It was the shape of a pentagram perhaps, or even a flower, but this, Constantine thought, was one ugly blossom. The great round face was blackened with soot, creased like old saddle leather, the nose stubby, the cheeks pitted, the small flinty eyes set deep in the sockets of the heavy-browed skull, his mouth a wide slash showing teeth worn to nubs. His hands were also blackened, and he wore a long tattered sleeveless robe, dark with grime. The biceps on his exposed arms were as big around as Constantine’s head. The boots on his shovel-sized feet were tied-up wrappings of what might be human skin.
But what caught Constantine’s notice was the silvery, adamantine chain, with links big as his hand, crisscrossing the man’s chest and then running to a hole in the stone wall behind him.
Reassured that the enormous man was on a short leash, Constantine stepped into view. “That the usual human flesh stew that’s so popular round here, squire?” he asked. He wasn’t going to sink that low. No, never. Well . . . Not this side of two weeks in a lifeboat.