by Mal Peet
‘No, no. No frolicking, Pocket, I promise. The Amulet is yours, fair and square.’ Philip pulled it free of his shirt. The clerk’s eyes locked onto it. ‘It’s just that I thought … well, that you’d want to. Write the last part, you know. You should, Pocket. Honestly. You have a genius for it, and that is definitely not too strong a word.’
Wellfair said nothing.
Philip lifted the chain over his head and held the Amulet in his cupped hands, gazing at it like a widow about to scatter her husband’s ashes on a golf course. Then he lifted his face, which wore, he hoped, an expression that was both teasing and beseeching.
‘Come on, Pocket, my old friend. Let’s do another one. Finish the sequence. You know you want to. And it’s not a lot to ask, is it? It only took you a few days to do the last one.’
The Greme’s face twitched. A smile or a sneer or something in between.
‘Fluke me, Murdstone. You never give up, do you?’
‘The thing is, I really need another one. These things come in threes, you see? I don’t know why, they just do. Look, I know I’ve nothing to bargain with. I have to give you the Amulet. I know that. I’d be too frightened not to. But we’re friends, aren’t we? And, and, I found the Amulet. I looked after it for you.’
Pocket’s face hardened.
‘Please, please write me another one. Look, I understand how important the Amulet is to you. To Cadrel. To the Realm. Of course I do. I’m not frolicking about here, Pocket. But what you need to understand is that another book is just as important to me as the Amulet is to you. Really. It would save my life. All right, it is a lot to ask …’
Wellfair raised a pale and featureless hand, and Philip fell silent. He thought he could hear a faint humming in the room, like the tiny sound a light bulb makes just before it dies.
‘You’re a greedy little piddick, Murdstone.’
‘Yes. Yes, I am. But also needy, Pocket. I can only appeal to your better nature. Help me. Please.’
‘All right, all right. Fluke me.’
‘You mean you will? You’ll write me another nobble? Promise?’
‘Promise? You ask me to promise, you backsliding arsewart?’
‘No, sorry, Pocket. Sorry. OK. That’s fine. Thank you. Thank you.’
‘Keep your thanks, Murdstone. They interest me less than a miretoad’s quim. Now get up off your imaginary bleddy knees and give me the Amulet.’
Philip held it out.
‘No, no. Dangle it by the chain. That’s a good pony. Now reach your arm out towards me, nice and steady.’
Philip did as he was told. At this long-awaited and ceremonious moment he felt the need to lower his head in a gesture of solemnity.
Pocket approached slowly, murmuring words in the Old Language. When he was an arm’s reach away, Philip inhaled a little gasp. Where the chain lay across his fingers he experienced an icy tingling. The Amulet itself appeared to be vibrating, in that its edges became indistinct and then distinct again; yet it did not seem to be in motion. It increased slightly but discernibly in weight. He looked up.
‘Pocket …?’
The Greme had halted. His wide eyes were fixed on the Amulet. A spasm passed over his pallid face, as though a hundred tiny muscles had twitched beneath the surface of his skin. He licked his lips. The tip of his tongue was dark blue.
‘Pocket? What’s happening?’
The Greme seemed not to have heard him. His mouth twisted, struggling to utter words that would not come.
Now the Amulet moved. It rotated slowly through three hundred and sixty degrees and when it was facing Pocket once more the Greme shuddered and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, each had extruded a thick white tear that wriggled, rather than trickled, down his cheeks. Pocket put a hand to his face and wiped them away. They fell to the carpet. They looked like grains of rice until they started to move. Philip watched them with horrified fascination for a moment or two, then was distracted because the Amulet jerked on the end of its chain and became so heavy that he had to use both hands to support it.
‘Pocket? What the fuck is happening?’
His voice died. More thick white tears were oozing from Wellfair’s eyes, eyes that were now darkening into black apertures. The Greme’s blue-tipped fingers wiped at them weakly. Those he managed to brush from his face fell and twitched on the floor. His mouth opened. It was full of maggots.
Philip’s scream blended with another sound, a sound something like a huge sigh of ecstasy, and the Amulet opened itself, hingeing apart like a tide-wakened mollusc. It sucked the light from the room and concentrated it into a blueish beam that focused mercilessly on Pocket.
Philip struggled, panicking, to let go of the damned thing, but could not. Nor could he speak. Nor take his eyes from Pocket.
Who was decomposing. The Greme’s head went back and his mouth gargled a final imprecation that sprayed pale pupae into the air. The neckerchief fell from his melting throat revealing, momentarily, a seething diagonal slash. The pale flesh of his long fingers dissolved into squirming gobbets that dripped to the floor. Then the clothes collapsed, affording Philip glimpses of bone and slackening sinew before the sticky white swarm consumed them.
Then Pocket was gone.
The Amulet drew its blue force back into itself and closed with a muted hiccup.
Philip was now alone in his living room with a vast colony of larvae. He could hear them. They were murmuring, seeking each other, having hectic miniature discussions, forming themselves into groups. Groups that formed larger groups. Piling themselves into shapes. Building something. The air in the room was now a faecal, gangrenous stench. Whimpering, Philip climbed onto the sofa and crouched at the end furthest from the nightmare. He clutched the Amulet with the fingers of both hands, holding it in front of him, without knowing why, yet completely unable to let go of it.
At tremendous speed, the millions of maggots formed themselves into a mound with three increasingly distinct sections. Their squirming surfaces hardened and darkened into a glistening carapace. Long tendrils emerged then thickened into jointed legs, blackened, grew claws, sprouted bristles. Two legs were deformed. Next, with a sound like Velcro parting, big wet buds burst from the thing’s back and grew into hard transparent wings stretched on black metallic spars. The head swelled into being: two huge multifaceted bubbles above hirsute, gluey mouth-parts. One of these eyes glittered. The other resembled a diseased grapefruit.
The maggots that had assumed the necromantic form of Pocket Wellfair had become a giant bluebottle that smelled of shit and ammonia.
Complete, the creature was motionless for a moment or two. Then its legs adjusted position, tilting the grotesque head slightly downwards. From the end of its proboscis, the fly extruded its labella, a flat hairy tongue the size of a cow’s. It drooled necrotic saliva onto the carpet. Apparently not finding what it sought, the fly turned itself, using brisk movements of its thorny legs, in Philip’s direction.
Philip wanted to scramble behind the sofa, but found himself mesmerized and peculiarly listless. He could not tell if it was his soul or his breakfast that threatened to rise into his mouth. The giant tongue slathered across the floor towards him and climbed onto the sofa. It settled on Philip’s shoe, ensliming it, then moved, in sticky paroxysms, up towards the meat of his leg.
The Amulet bucked, sighed, opened. Its intense blue radiance coated the fly in flickering light, just for an instant. The monster recoiled and toppled away sideways, its legs flailing, its gross abdomen convulsing. Its immense and frenzied buzzing set the entire cottage vibrating, rattled the windows in their frames.
This shockwave of sound shook Philip from his trance. ‘Die, you fucker!’ he screamed. ‘Die!’
Heartfelt though it was, his wish had the opposite effect. In a fast sequence of spastic motions, the fly righted itself. It stood twitching slightly, silent now, a thick thread of mucus hanging from its complex jaws. Then, briskly as before, it turned towards the sofa once again. Phili
p thrust the Amulet out towards the giant insect, but there was no blast of light.
He shook it urgently. ‘Come on, come on!’
Nothing.
‘Oh, please, bloody please!’
The fly advanced.
Then stopped.
Philip, paralytic with dread, found himself gazing into its bulbous eyes. Myriad disfigured faces of Morl Morlbrand looked back at him.
The fly spoke. ‘Lower the Amulet, Murdstone. It will not destroy me here, outside the Realm.’
The voice was a thousand voices gnarled into one. The night-voice of some limitless forest. It was sonorous, and – considering that it emanated from a fly so recently swatted by a million-volt blast of Magick – oddly self-assured.
Philip did not, could not, move.
‘I enjoy fear, Murdstone. Especially when it is pure. Distilled. Uncontaminated. Is that what I would savour if I were to lick the sweat from your face? Or would I get the bitter aftertaste that traces of hope leave on the palate?’
‘Don’t touch me. Please. Leave me alone. You can have the Amulet. Really. I don’t want it.’
The Morl-fly lowered itself, as though relaxing. ‘No? Then why don’t you just reach out and drop it in front of me? Go on. Then all your troubles will be over. Go on.’
He couldn’t do it. His fingers were locked onto the Amulet, and when he tried to push it away it resisted with a force far greater than the strength of his arms.
The fly laughed stickily. ‘You thought, did you not, that you were in possession of the Amulet. As in all things, you were wrong. It possesses you. Believe me, it would have been better for you had I relieved you of it. Unfortunately for both of us, I miscalculated. I thought I had plumbed and reconfigured its ancient enchantment. Now I find I yet have work to do. Further depths to mine. Lakes of deeper darkness to angle in.’
Despite the terror that had disabled his normal bodily processes, Philip thought he recognized something familiar in the necromancer’s diction, the somewhat scholarly syntax.
‘Doubt not that I will succeed, Murdstone. Nothing remains that can stop me; not even Death, with whom, as you have seen, I have reached a certain accommodation. So to speak.’ Another oleaginous chortle.
‘All I wanted was a fucking story,’ Philip cried.
‘No, Murdstone. You wanted my story. And that is a somewhat different matter, as you will discover.’
The phone rang.
Abruptly, the fly contracted its tongue into its chitinous channel and turned away like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons. The legs made another series of angular movements, their claws audibly finding new purchase on the carpet. Philip shrank back, but the fly swung away from him towards the fireplace.
‘I regret I must curtail this conversation. Time does not keep well, frozen, even in the Thule. Adieu, Murdstone. I shall be back. I have your coordinates now. That’s a little crumb of certainty for you. You may find it of some comfort, I dare say, now that the limits of your world have melted. But I, at least, can be depended upon.’
The fly crawled into the fireplace and angled its body upwards. Its front legs found claw-holds in the blackened chimney-throat. Then, with a good deal of thorny scrabbling, it climbed up and out of sight.
13
It took almost a month for the Great Fly of Flemworthy to pass into folklore. The delay resulted from a certain degree of suspicion attached to the key witnesses. Merilee and Francine were, outwardly, perfectly normal. On the other hand, they were twins. There was talk about them of a sexual nature. More significantly still, they were librarians and therefore fanciful. As Leon said, on a night when the Fly was being warmly debated in the Gelder’s Rest, ‘’Tain’t by chance they calls them places lie berries.’
Francine and Merilee themselves maintained a quiet certitude. There was an increase in traffic through the library of people feigning an interest in aerobics videos, but in response to questioning, Merilee, or possibly Francine, would say, ‘I seen what I seen, an thas all I’m sane.’
When the monthly livestock market took over the abandoned industrial estate on the outskirts of the town, things swung in the sisters’ favour. Posh Widow Flaxman, the broad and reputedly lesbian owner of the Toggenheim Goat Stud the other side of Grimspound, was the improbable backer of their story. Between the Ready Porkers and the Overwintered Sterks she held forth in the refreshment tent.
‘Sunday, it was. Hello, Bernard. You what? Forty fucking quid a beast? Hell’s teeth. What can you do? Bloody Europe. See you later. Anyway. Yes, the same again. Cheers. What was I saying? What? Oh yes. Lunchtime, it was. Just got to the paddock when this shadow passed over it. Thought nothing of it, of course. Cloud. Then, bugger me if six of the nannies and both billies didn’t fall down in a faint. Just like that. Like they’d been shot. Couldn’t believe it. No, Gerry, I had not been on the sherberts, as you so quaintly put it. But while we’re on the subject … Thanks. Splash of water with it. Cheers. The goats? Came round after a minute or two. They’re still not right, though. Poor old Ajax is still off his rumpy. Might have to shoot the bugger if he doesn’t pull his socks up. Say what you like, it was a bloody rum business.’
Further confirmation – of a sort – came later the same day when the insanitary mystic Krishna Mersey came down off the moor for his weekly Vedic encounter with the fish and chip van from Okehampton. It wasn’t easy to understand Krishna at the best of times, and on this occasion he was so full of a jittery sort of gloom that he made sense only intermittently. But those queuing for their haddock and scratchings were left in no doubt that an Avatar of really Bad Karma, man, had passed over his encampment on Sunday. It was, like, a really intense shadow. And, like you would, Krishna had looked up to see what was casting it. Nothing, man. Like, nothing. Clear blue beautiful spiritual empty sky. All the same, there was this shadow. And it was so intense, man. And full of negativity. As soon as it touched his tomatoes (in reality these were marijuana plants disguised with red Christmas baubles) they’d like just wilted and died, man. Half the crop gone. It was like a sign, man. Had to be.
But because Krishna was a Liverpudlian who lived in something called a yurt his evidence could not be trusted entirely.
Then it transpired that Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Arthur Rogers-Jelly MC JP of Sullencott Manor had suffered a similar experience. On Sunday afternoon he’d been whiling away the time between volumes of his memoirs by breathing on the glass of his library window and playing noughts and crosses against himself. He’d just completed a drawn game when a shadow passed across his vision and the room went utterly dark. He’d assumed, naturally, that he’d had a stroke. He’d pressed the panic button on his desk to summon his housekeeper, who’d bustled in to confirm that he was both conscious and more or less upright. After a large and restorative pink gin, Sir Arthur had made a patrol of his grounds. He’d been dismayed to discover the south lawn disfigured by a broad brown swathe of withered grass. It ran diagonally from the ha-ha to the wall of the kitchen garden. Further reconnaissance revealed that in the garden itself four rows of brassicas and three of strawberries had been devastated by a sticky black mould.
The colonel delivered a briefing on these matters to his fellow Rotarians at their monthly meeting. It was followed by a half minute of silence, during which uncomfortable glances were exchanged and throats were cleared.
‘Well,’ ventured Pharmacist Allcock, ‘we, I at any rate, have heard these, er, reports of a, ah, unnaturally large, er, emerging from Philip Murdstone’s chimney.’
‘Claptrap,’ the colonel said. ‘Superstitious nonsense. Stammering eleven-toed halfwits around here will believe anything. I should know. Have ’em up in front of the Bench on a weekly basis.’
Another silence was broken by Surveyor Gammon. ‘So you think there is a rational explanation for this phenomenon, do you, Colonel?’
‘Course I do. Rational explanation for everything.’ The old soldier looked sternly at his colleagues, then leaned forward over his clasped hands.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, in a quieter voice, ‘I want your absolute assurance that what I am about to say will go no further than these four walls. Understood? Yes?’
All nodded.
‘Very well. It is my considered opinion that what we’re dealing with here is a drone.’
‘Ah,’ Gordon Chouse exclaimed. ‘A bee.’
‘Not a bloody bee, man! A drone. Unmanned aircraft. Spy in the sky.’
The Rotarians gazed at him.
‘Now then,’ Sir Arthur continued, ‘if you plot the course of this thing on the map – meant to bring it with me, forgot, sorry – from Flemworthy to the Manor, you get a line running south by south-west. Project that line forty miles or so, and where do you end up?’ He was forced to provide his own answer. ‘Plymouth. And there is, in the vicinity of Plymouth, a certain establishment involved in what we might call, ahem, Military Futurology.’
‘The Technical Support Unit,’ exclaimed Malcolm Sweet, proprietor of Farm and Leisure Footwear. ‘The wife’s brother does the catering. They don’t half—’ The colonel’s glare withered him and he fell silent.
‘I am certain in my own mind that what overflew the Manor last Sunday was something dreamed up by the boffins of the TSU. Test flight. Heading back to base. Nothing whatever to do with your writer chappie.’ Sir Arthur leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.
Gammon said, ‘What puzzles me is this fly business …’
‘Ah, well. It’s possible, very possible in fact, that the drone was indeed disguised as a fly. The big eye thingies packed with cameras and whathaveyou. Spot a tick on a stag’s arse from a mile up, that sort of thing.’
Heads were nodded.
‘Why a fly, though, Sir Arthur? Why not, I don’t know, a bird or …?’
‘Obvious, isn’t it? Where are the theatres?’
The Rotarians blanked. Well, there was the Plough Arts Centre at Torrington. The Northcott in Exeter. Bristol Old Vic …
‘Afghanistan. Iraq. Somalia. Iran, if we’re lucky. What do they all have in common? Flies. Bloody flies everywhere. See what I’m getting at? Johnny Raghead looks up, sees a fly. One of thousands above his sweaty little turban. Doesn’t notice that it’s much higher up than the others. Doesn’t realize that it’s taking photographs of the rust on his Kalashnikov, the attack map he’s drawn in the sand with a stick, the Semtex he’s stuffing into his cummerbund. Get the picture? Bloody clever. I take my hat off to those chaps. Quality intelligence is what tips the balance every time.’