The Cockatrice Boys

by Joan Aiken

When Dakin took in the colonel’s eleven o’clock acorn coffee (he had been allotted this task since the loss of Sauna) he found a conference going on with Clipspeak, Upfold, Major Scanty, and the archbishop.

  “There is a legend, a folk-myth, or whatever you care to call it, current in Melrose that Michael Scott spent some of the last weeks of his life in Sorrow Abbey. And that he may perhaps have left the book there,” said Dr. Wren.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Dakin, suddenly putting two and two together. “That must have been what old Liquorice was jawing on about—I mean, Tom Flint. Sorrow, he kept saying. Sorrow, Sorrow.”

  “Flint? He mentioned Sorrow Abbey? What did he say about it?” Dr. Wren was galvanized. “Why, pray, did you not tell us this before?”

  “I forgot,” mumbled Dakin. “He said such a lot. It didn’t seem important. He was going on and on about glens and abbeys and hermits’ caves…”

  “You forgot! Wretched boy! Did he mention the location of Sorrow Abbey?”

  “Is it not on the map?” suggested Colonel Clipspeak hopefully.

  “Unfortunately no, Colonel. It was sacked and pillaged so many times during the Border Wars that its whereabouts now are wholly uncertain. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that it is not too far distant from the town of Dollar (probably Dolour in the first place), and presumably situated somewhere in Glen Sorrow, which runs up from Dollar to the north-east of Ben Cleuch.”

  “Yes, that makes sense,” agreed the colonel, consulting his wall map. “But if it is not there any longer I do not see that there is much use in sending an expeditionary force to search for this hypothetical volume—if there are not even ruins. We can hardly search the whole glen?”

  “What else did Tom Flint say to you, boy? Try to rack your brains—this is terribly important.”

  “The book. He said it was wrapped in cloth of copper. Pinned with a gold pin. What is this book, sir?”

  “Michael Scott’s Book of Power. It is said to answer every possible question—whether moral, scientific, practical, or theoretical.”

  “A kind of Enquire Within Upon Everything,” remarked Upfold. “Pretty handy, hey? Would presumably tell us how to get rid of the monsters.”

  “What is even more important,” said Dr. Wren, “is to prevent it falling into the hands of the adversaries.”

  “Adversaries. That was what Flint called them too,” said Dakin. “His friends, he said they were.”

  “Fine friends! He’ll be sorry at the end of the day,” snapped Scanty.

  “Yes,” recalled Dakin. “He wasn’t so happy about them when he thought they had skived off and left him, and his hands and feet hurt him so bad. I asked where they had taken Sauna and he said—wait a mo, I’m getting it—something about Crook of Devon and Rumbling Bridge. He said—he said there were lots of witches there.”

  “Used to be, a couple of centuries ago,” said Dr. Wren. “The Ochils have always been borderline country—between lowlands and highlands, between this world and the next. Did Flint say what his friends proposed to do with the Book of Power?”

  “I’ve forgotten,” said Dakin sadly. “Something to do with the disintegration of the human ethos. There was a lot of long words.”

  “Oh, why didn’t I stay with the miserable wretch myself?” lamented the archbishop.

  “You were saving a good many men’s lives who had been severely hurt by Basilisks,” the colonel briskly reminded him. “Who would almost certainly be dead by now if it weren’t for you.”

  They all stared at Dakin, as if they would like to pull memory out of him like teeth.

  “Maximum chaos,” Dakin remembered. “First they got the monsters through a hole in the ozone layer. Now they want to stir up more trouble.”

  “And the book will help them do this.”

  “S’pose so.”

  Dakin felt dreadfully tired. What with watching Tom Flint, and guilty worry over Sauna, and the Kelpie battle, and then feeling that everybody disapproved of him, all he wanted to do was lie down and forget his troubles in sleep. He was aware of the onset of a yawn, working its way up all the way from his toes. He struggled against it until his ears crackled, but out it came.

  “All right, boy, you can go,” said the colonel wearily.

  A croaking voice suddenly made them all jump. It came from nobody in the room. It was faint, as if it floated in from far away, shrill and full of malice.

  “Don’t go to Dollar!” it said. “Don’t go to Dollar!” And then ran off into gabbled nursery nonsense. “A dillar a dollar a ten o’clock scholar, what makes you rise so soon, don’t look for Sauna unless you would mourn her, she’ll die before the new moon. King Edward’s Day, King Edward’s Day. That’s when they gather, that’s when they play. That’s when their strength is highest. We must, we must have it by then.”

  The voice died away.

  “That was my Auntie Floss,” said Dakin, working his tongue around his mouth to moisten it. “Or, at least, it sounded like her the time I went to her place in Manchester. And I thought I heard Sauna’s voice too—just for a moment.”

  They all stared at him. He suddenly remembered something.

  “Tom Flint had this bit of paper. He said his friends forgot he had it. He couldn’t read it. Nor could I. I put it in my pocket when the siren went—”

  He pulled it out: dirty, crumpled, greasy, slightly frayed at the cracks where it had been folded.

  The eyes of everybody in the room fastened on it like staples.

  “That’s Ogham script,” said Dr. Wren.

  “Can you read it?” asked the colonel.

  Chapter ten

  Auntie Floss giggled almost all the time now. She sat with her unbelievably skinny bare legs sticking straight out in front of her on the low bed, and rubbed dark green ointment on to her fingers and toes. Sauna noticed, without any particular increase of disgust, that she had webs between her toes, and there were not so many toes as most people have.

  “Always get terrible chilblains this time of year,” Floss confided, in the high wheezy voice that sounded like a tape played at double speed. “Wintergreen is best for chilblains. I told them, Put it in the box. In the box, I told them.”

  The box of groceries might have been packed by a computer. There was powdered tarragon, but no sugar; flour, but no butter; isinglass, but no soap; gum tragacanth, but no mustard; biscuits, but no cheese; washing-soda, but no salt. Tins of corned beef and soup were useless because there was no tin-opener, either in the box or in the cottage. Sauna had managed to cook a potful of porridge over the fire with oatmeal and some water from the barrel (this was full of green slime, but she supposed that boiling would disinfect it). When the blizzard outside died down a little she fetched in a bowlful of snow and left it to melt. And she found an iron bar to poke the fire with, and more peat in a shed.

  Seen in daylight the wicker figure outside the door, now thickly covered with snow, looked harmless and inoffensive enough; she supposed that it was simply put there to frighten. Or perhaps as a sign, like a barber’s pole: this is the witch’s cottage.

  “How long have you been here, Aunt Floss?” she tried asking.

  The creature on the bed giggled.

  “Fifty years, my dearie. Since the newspapers were first put down on the floor. Your grandpa was alive then. I put down those papers. They’ve lasted well.”

  “That’s just not possible,” Sauna said. “Anyway, the papers are only ten years old.”

  But that was all the answer she got.

  Among the contents of the cardboard carton were countless pills, in various little pots and vials and bottles and flasks. Aunt Floss swallowed pills continually in handfuls.

  She used to do that in Manchester too, remembered Sauna; that is, if it is Auntie Floss? Or does she just do it to make me believe that she is Auntie Floss?

  “When you get to my age and state of health, dearie, your system needs extra vitamins,” the creature giggled. “You’ll have to start taking them too,
by and by. When you take on the job here. It wears you out, that it does!”

  “I’m not staying here,” Sauna said.

  “That’s what you think, dearie. You’ll feel different later.”

  When the porridge was cooked, Sauna ate hers out of the saucepan, standing in the open front door, looking at the whirling snow. She had found only one bowl on the dresser, so spooned a helping of porridge into it for the creature on the bed, but could not bear to be a spectator of the eating process. She had a horrible feeling that the oatmeal was in fact eaten by the rat, Maukin, who peered out sometimes from under the covers and bared its teeth evilly at Sauna.

  “My mannie,” Aunt Floss called it. “My little piggesnie. My ratto.”

  After midday, when the snow began to slacken off, Aunt Floss said, “We’ll tell our fortunes. Now go in the parlour, switch on the TV.”

  “Are you crazy? There’s no current. There’s no electricity. No aerial.”

  Aunt Floss giggled. “That’s no matter! We managed without it for thousands of years. Switch on, I say.”

  Shrugging, Sauna went into the back room.

  “Mind my china!” came the shrill exhortation. “Mind my precious things!”

  Edging between the table with its load of tiny china pots and the wall, Sauna pressed the ON button of the TV set. A light flickered in the middle of the screen.

  She suddenly heard Dakin’s voice saying, “The book will help them.”

  Colonel Clipspeak said, “They want to stir up more trouble.”

  Aunt Floss in the next room cried out, “Don’t go to Dollar! Don’t go to Dollar! You’ll all be killed if you do!” Then she began to sing, a squeaky nursery rhyme.

  “Stop that!” shouted Sauna. She pressed the button again. The flickering light faded and vanished.

  In the front room the being on the bed propped itself against the wall and sat crosslegged, grinning at Sauna, with slit eyes shining green.

  “Plenty of things you don’t know yet, my pettikin!”

  Sauna walked to the open door and stood breathing huge gulps of air. The cold burned her. But the sky was clear now; no more snow fell. The little glade around the cottage shone with reflected snow-light. Up above, to right and left, the great fir-hung mountains towered like a wall.

  The voice from inside called “Come here. Come back, lambskin. There’s lot of things that want doing. Things I need!”

  With huge reluctance, Sauna turned back into the stinking room. Even though her bare feet were frozen, she had rather stand in the doorway, breathe fresh air, look at the white emptiness and dark forest outside, than walk back into that fetid atmosphere.

  The creature on the bed said, “Now, dearie, you have to go out on an errand for me. Up the hill, three turns of the path. Young legs and feet, young hands, you can easily do it. Only three turns of the path. Where the old monks once used to live. You go up there. Fetch it for me.”

  “I can’t fetch anything,” Sauna said. “I’ve only one shoe. I’m not going barefoot in the snow.”

  There was a pause. The creature in the bed seemed to consider.

  Time went by. Then the creature said, “But, pet, your things are in there, in the press. In the back room. Cupboard under the dresser.”

  “My things? How can they possibly be? I don’t believe you.”

  “Go and look, pettikin.”

  Sauna looked in the cupboard under the dresser. There was her shabby blue travel bag, the one she had brought back from Spain. In it was a queer selection of her old clothes and belongings—clothes she had taken to Spain on that holiday, school uniforms from several years back, sweaters that had ravelled to pieces and been thrown away in Newcastle, beach flip-flops, outworn trainers. No winter boots.

  “No winter boots,” she said, returning. “I’m not going through the snow in flip-flops. Anyway, why should I? What for?”

  (Though indeed, part of her was all in favour of going up the hill. If there is a way out, take it, take it! Don’t stay here in this grisly hovel. If there is a path that goes on over the hill, you need not come back.)

  “There’s a pair of boots,” said the creature on the bed. “Look again.”

  Impatiently, Sauna looked again, and there were boots; a pair that Aunt Floss had taken to a basement rummage sale two years ago because they were outgrown.

  “These are much too small,” Sauna said. “They don’t fit any more.”

  “Cut the toes off, then, dearie.”

  “Look: what is it you want, up the hill? What’s so important?”

  “Book,” said the creature. “Up the glen where the old monks used to live and sing. In days when I was young and pretty. Younger and prettier than you. Cave in cliff. Old Hermit’s cave. Book, all wrapped up. You bring book.”

  The word book, three times repeated, echoed in Sauna’s mind. In that queer snatch of overheard conversation, caught, goodness knows how, on the dead, disconnected television channel, Colonel Clipspeak had said, “They want to stir up more trouble,” and Dakin—that’s right—Dakin had said, “The book will help them.”

  Dear Dakin! To hear his voice had been like a sudden touch of warm sunshine on her face.

  But the book. It was something important, then. Everybody wanted it. To make trouble?

  “Why should I bring the book?” she said to the skeleton on the bed. “Who wants it?”

  “Friends. My friends. When they come on King Edward’s Day.”

  “Your friends.”

  “Astarte, Abiron, Asmodeus, Belial … Soon they come. In power and thunder. Bring the book for them, they give you power too.”

  “If they have that power,” said Sauna, “why can’t they get the book for themselves?”

  “Human hands—human eyes.”

  Will they really come? Can she mean it? Sauna wondered. I hope I’m not here then. Let Aunt Floss entertain them on her own. The Princes of Air.

  She had a sudden swift shuddering vision of someone with a blue crest on his head, like snow blown backwards in a gale, with bright, cold, curling flames under the soles of his feet, with flesh transparent as water, with seaweed floating among his bones …

  If those are her friends, I don’t want to meet them.

  She tried on the boots.

  They were certainly far too small.

  * * *

  By the time the crew of the Cockatrice Belle had cleared and mended a way for themselves across the flat watery plain of Clackmannan, dusk was falling. The formidable shadowy height of King’s Seat Hill and Ben Cleuch rose up on their left like a black wall; no lights twinkled ahead where the towns of Tillicoultry and Dollar might be supposed to lie. The River Devon crept and wriggled like a pale glimmering serpent in the valley. The landscape was ominously quiet, as if something in it was gathering for a pounce.

  “I don’t like it,” muttered Colonel Clipspeak to Major Scanty. “It ain’t natural for a place to be so quiet. There ought at least to be rooks—or gulls or eagles flying about. Tell the men to keep on full monster-alert at all times.”

  “Certainly, Colonel. It will be too bad if the town of Dollar is entirely deserted. It used to be a pleasant little place when I spent time there as a lad.”

  “Oh, you know it, do you, Major?”

  “I went to school there. McNab’s Academy, you know.”

  The colonel did not know, and was not particularly interested, but said, “That is capital, then. Your familiarity with the town may stand us in good stead if there is a battle; which I greatly fear there will be. Ah, here is Dr. Wren. Do you not find this unusual quiet somewhat ominous, Archbishop? Deuced suspicious?”

  The archbishop was in a high state of excitement. “Oh, yes, I expect they are mustering their forces,” he said, “but listen to this, Colonel! I have solved the enigma of the paper, I have cracked its code. As I said, it is written in Ogham script.”

  “Ogham?”

  “A mode of writing, using lines and crosses, employed by the ancient Irish. I da
resay Michael Scott may have picked it up too, since he was a great linguist and polymath.”

  “Gracious me, Archbishop! So what does the paper say?”

  “Oh, well, nothing much that we did not know already: the paper is a kind of testament; Michael Scott asks that his book be interred, not with him at Melrose Abbey, but in what he calls ‘the sacred cave’ at Sorrow Abbey—‘so that profane, unhallowed fingers may not unearth and examine its hidden lore, whereby great and terrible mischief might ensue, but where it may rest safe and untouched until the Judgement Day uncovers all secrets’—”

  “Does he say where, precisely, the sacred cave is to be found?” demanded the colonel impatiently.

  “No, he says ‘the locality of which is known only to the holy monks of Sorrow Abbey.’”

  “Much use that is to us! Since they all died out several hundred years ago!” exclaimed the colonel. “But—wait a moment—you were saying, Major, that you were familiar with the environment of Dollar and Glen Sorrow?”

  * * *

  All along the train men were preparing for the battle, which everybody felt sure would take place very soon. The only uncertain factor was what particular kind of opponent would they be fighting? Trolls and Kelpies seemed probable in a region so close to the Firth of Forth. But then there were the Ochils to the north, so dark and menacing—who knew what unknown perils might lurk among their crags, covered now in snow?

  Major Scanty, when consulted, had suggested the Chichevache, a kind of bony monster with horns; but fortunately this creature preferred a diet of females—which might explain the lack of them to be seen about the countryside, but made it less dangerous to the crew of the Cockatrice Belle. Two-horned Bycorns were also to be expected, and Chimeras, which had lions’ heads, goats’ bodies, and serpentine tails.

  “No wings, luckily,” said Scanty. “So they may be picked off by the same weapons that are in use for Kelpies. But I am afraid the most likely enemy we have to expect will be Mirkindoles and Gorgons.”

  “Gorgons?” said Sergeant Bellswinger. “Then we must issue all the troops with Snark goggles. Lucky we’ve been recharging ’em as we came along. Gorgons are no joke.”