The Printer's Devil

by Chico Kidd

  ‘You’re an opera buff, aren’t you?’ Josie asked.

  ‘Kim more than me, really. I’m just as fond of orchestral stuff.’

  ‘What’s your favourite opera?” Debbie enquired, leaning her chin lightly on the fingers of one hand, which put dimples in her face.

  ‘I like lots of them,’ Alan answered, unable to be precise. ‘I suppose Rigoletto or Trovatore. Sometimes I get hankerings for Puccini.’

  ‘What’s your favourite Puccini opera, then?’

  ‘Sometimes Butterfly - sometimes Tosca.’

  ‘Oh, Tosca. She’s too old,’ said Debbie.

  ‘Too old?’ repeated Alan, momentarily startled.

  ‘’Course. Well, think about it, she’s already a diva, isn’t she? And Cavaradossi is a famous painter, or they wouldn’t let him paint in the church, and the Sacristan wouldn’t bring him sandwiches. So they must both be at least thirty.’

  Alan winced - he was thirty-five - and said, ‘Is that why you like Butterfly, because she’s just fifteen?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Debbie. ‘Though Pinkerton’s such a rat, and she must be a real wimp to pine over him. It’s just that I love the music.’

  Josie stood up. ‘Well, I’d better go and make cooking noises. Alan, would you like to stay for lunch?’ ‘Oh, no, it’s all right, thanks,’ said Alan, in a sort of panic. ‘I’d only be in the way.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Debbie argued. ‘Mum wouldn’t ask you if we didn’t have loads of food, and I bet you haven’t got any at home while Kim’s away.’

  ‘Debbie!’ said her mother.

  ‘She’s right,’ Alan said hastily. ‘If you really have got enough, I’d love to stay. I’m at a bit of a loose end today.’

  ‘Can I put some music on, then?’

  ‘Yes, but let’s have a rest from Butterfly. You’ll wear the record out.’

  ‘Oh, Dad. What, then? Alan, you choose.’

  Alan looked at the shelves of boxed LPs and selected Un ballo in maschera. ‘You’d better do the honours, I don’t want to scratch it,’ he said to Debbie, who was sitting on the floor by the stereo.

  ‘I like Oscar in this,’ she said.

  ‘That’d suit you,’Alan smiled, then was astonished to hear himself add, ‘I’ll teach you Italian, if you like.’ Debbie looked up. ‘Really?’

  ‘Provided it’s okay with your parents.’

  ‘Only if you’re sure it won’t be too much trouble for you, Alan,’ replied Alec. ‘And Debs, don’t you forget you’ve got extra singing lessons.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Alan. ‘We wouldn't make it any more than, say, once or twice a week?’

  ‘Brilliant!’ exclaimed Debbie, and scrambled to her feet to go and inform her mother.

  Horrified, Alan heard Carlo Bergonzi on the record: ‘La rivedra nell’estasi raggiante dipallore...’ ‘What ecstasy to see her again, in her glowing pallor...'

  I can’t possibly fancy that child, he thought in a panic, she’s fourteen years old, for God’s sake - what am I thinking of?

  The four of them spent the afternoon playing Trivial Pursuit, a game which Alan usually won. But today his thoughts were in chaos, and there was no clear winner by the time Debbie and her mother had to leave to ring a quarter.

  Alan stood up too and said, ‘I’d better go too. Thanks for the lunch, Josie.’

  Outside, he found his hands were inclined to shake, and it took him three tries before he got the key in the ignition. He looked at his hands on the steering-wheel, and tensed them so the tendons stood out.

  Then he jabbed at the tape-player and turned up the volume.

  ‘Amiche, son venuta al richiamo d’amor...’ sang Cio-Cio-San. ‘My friends, I’ve come at the call of love...’

  ‘Damn,’ said Alan.

  Back home, he found himself unable to relax. He wandered round the house; went into the garden and pulled out a few weeds; then ambled indoors again.

  This won’t do, he thought, sitting at his desk. Here his eyes were drawn to the scrying-glass and cloth, both of which he could have sworn he had left in the bedroom: he looked at the glass with distaste, remembering that stench and the overwhelming presence.

  Casting around almost desperately for something mundane to anchor his brain, Alan picked up his diary. A client meeting in the morning. Good. Something thunderingly banal like a Grand Prize Draw ought to cure his agitation. He opened the filing drawer in his desk and drew out the client’s brown folder. Although he knew the account backwards, he forced himself now to look through all the old mailing packs he had done for them—even to read some of the copy. This was a thing he usually resisted strongly; while he enjoyed re-reading features and articles which had given him pleasure to write, copywriting came from another part of his brain entirely and was no pleasure at all.

  Presently he reached up and switched on the lamp, which pooled light over what he was reading while shadows gathered around him, and the furniture began to lose its definition. Mesmerised by the print, Alan drifted into a near-trance - no longer reading, yet somehow transfixed by the shapes the words made on the page.

  Gradually his vision cleared. He found himself staring at the paper in front of him with curious incomprehension. It was no longer an invitation to send in the form and win a Caribbean cruise or any of fifty other superb prizes, but a yellow, parchmenty page covered with blurred print and notations in a precise, minute, old-fashioned handwriting.

  Still in a dream, Alan looked up, past the lamp which now seemed to flicker like a candle, and surveyed the room. It was as if, like a palimpsest, what had once been had laid itself over what was now. There was a man standing by the window, at a table on which Alan could dimly make out the outlines of curiously shaped glassware. One piece he recognised as an alembic. Now the man at the table was mixing things in a stone mortar, crushing and blending them with a wooden-handled pestle. Then he put down his tools and approached Alan’s desk.

  Alan saw that the man was tall and dark-haired, but there was nothing saturnine, or sinister, or even particularly strange in his appearance: there was just a thin face framed by long, rather untidy black hair which could have done with a wash. The man was wearing a baggy white shirt with a large square collar and loose breeches cut somewhat on the lines of Bermuda shorts, but in a dark colour. He appeared to be Alan’s age, or possibly a little younger. Reaching past the lantern on the desk, he put his broad hand on the book in front of Alan. Turning it round as if to consult it, he then read a little, frowning slightly, his lips moving soundlessly. Finally he nodded, reversed the book, and returned to his mixing by the window.

  The words on the page came clear to Alan.then, and he read, without at first comprehending: A Receipt to make a Maiden Enamour’d of a Man. Alan blinked, and read on. The ingredients were almost entirely unfamiliar to him. He did not know what Jew’s-lime was, nor retherne-tongue. Some remote part of his mind told him that he could look up the words, but it seemed unimportant.

  He raised his eyes to see the magician (magus, his mind corrected him) scrape the contents of his mortar into a stone jar and seal it, first with a cork, then with wax which he softened in the flame within the lantern and imprinted with a signet ring he took from his index finger. Two minutes later, he appeared to decide that the wax had hardened sufficiently, and slipped the jar into some concealed pocket in his clothing.

  Until now, Alan had sat a mute witness at his desk. Never once had it occurred to him that there was any overlapping between the dream, if dream it were, and reality, if this were truly reality; but the magus turned round just then, and met Alan’s gaze with a penetrating stare which was at once slightly amused and thoroughly in control. He smiled at Alan, and nodded.

  ‘Thy first lesson, my prentice. Mark it well,’ he said, and disappeared.

  Obediently Alan took a thick spiral-bound notepad from his desk drawer, uncapped his fountain-pen, and covered several pages with his straggly handwriting.

  ‘Thrice toss these oaken ashe
s in the ayre,

  Thrice sit thou mute in this inchanted chayre;

  Then thrice three times tye up this true love’s knot,

  And murmur soft, shee will, or shee will not.

  ‘Goe burne these poys’nous weedes in yon blew fire,

  These Screech-owles fethers, and this prickling bryer,

  This Cypresse gathered at a dead mans grave:

  That all thy feares and cares an end may have.

  ‘Then come, you Fayries, dance with me a round,

  Melt her hard hart with your melodious sound.

  In vaine are all the charms I can devise:

  She hath an Arte to breake them with her eyes.’

  Thomas Campion, Third Booke of Ayres, XVIII

  Alan woke to a day suddenly autumnal. Not that the trees’ leaves had turned sere overnight or that flowers in the gardens had ceased to grow; it was merely that a certain quality had entered the air and given it clarity beyond its brightness, and dew still lay pearled on the lawn. He dressed quickly, collected his client’s file, and set off for his morning meeting.

  It was not until he returned that afternoon and opened his desk drawer to replace the file that he suddenly remembered his dream of the previous night. He stopped in mid-motion, left the folder lying across the tops of his hanging files, and opened the shallow drawer beneath the desktop.

  His red spiral-bound notebook lay there. This was a repository for ideas, useful quotations, obscure words and their meanings, the odd poem which visited him, random thoughts and all other kinds of jottings. Now he eyed it as if it were a cobra coiled in the drawer - one which had not quite opened its hood.

  After a moment he pulled the fat notebook out and kneed the drawer shut, then flicked through the scribbles until he came to a page he recognised, and at which something inside him stirred. Quickly he scanned the rest of it, then turned it over and found three dense pages of automatic writing.

  TO Confound Ones Enemys.

  TO Assume a diffrent Semblance.

  TO Make a Maiden Enamour’d of a Man.

  There came a loosening inside Alan as he read, partly as if his heart had shifted in its home, partly akin to sexual desire, but mostly as if his entire axis had shifted to a different orbit. He was still Alan Bellman, but an Alan Bellman who was skewed.

  This time he understood the recipes he read, not even translating the old words. He knew that herteclowe meant germander, and galingale was sweet cypress. He knew where to find the ingredients and how to mix them, and in what season - when the sun was in Virgo: how fortuitous that revelation! - he also knew, with the certainty of a magus’s knowledge, that the spells would work.

  He spent the remainder of the day collecting what he would need. Certain items, including a stone pestle and mortar, and some thick greeny-grey glass vessels with corks, he obtained from a wholefood shop nearby, but most of them he gathered himself.

  Alan had never been able to suffer fools gladly, nor was he terribly good at dissembling. In the days when he’d worked for other people he had begun with the naive belief that it was the work itself which counted. Since then he’d learned how to compromise, but on the odd occasion when he’d had a fool for a boss, he had made no secret of his opinions.

  The last one who had sacked him still dwelt in his mind like an excised cancer, although it had been several years ago, and he was not a man who bore grudges as a rule: when he had moved out of the fool’s orbit, he forgot him.

  ‘To Confound ones Enemyes: It is not requir’d for a True Magus to obtayne Finger-Nailes or Haire of the Foe, as some Hedge-Witchs wolde haue us Doe; For to teach him a hard Chapter, Suffitient it is to invision his Countenance in the Mind; The Scrying-Glass may be imploy’d. The Potion must needs be Mixt as follows.’

  Evening was gathering as Alan measured his ingredients into the bowl and began, methodically, to crush and blend them together. The pungent scent which arose was unlike anything he had ever smelt before; his nose wrinkled as with an incipient sneeze. The smell was acrid and quite unpleasant. And yet, perversely, he wanted to keep on sniffing it.

  As he worked, the room gradually faded; or, rather, it became distanced, as if Alan stood within a cylinder of air that was other than the normal air in the room, which he breathed. His perceptions at once narrowed and seemed to broaden: narrowed, in that sight and smell and all the rest of the seven senses focused only upon what he was doing; broadened, in the sense that he was somehow aware of the width of the world, the infinity of the sky, the stars and the expanding universe. A strange hectic music sang there, but he had not the time to heed it: Words had to be whispered.

  When the herbs and oils and other substances were sufficiently mixed into a stiff paste, green-blue as the leaves of olive-trees, Alan shaped it into a tiny cone with his fingers. It felt somehow slick, a viscous and slippery surface which his fingers had not expected from the texture in the mortar.

  Having done this, Alan took up the scrying-glass. In the back of his mind, a momentary fear visited him, some remote part of him recalling with horror the roiling visions he had seen, and the presence which set his spine to crawling when he thought about it, but with an effort of concentration he put those thoughts aside, and bent to the glass.

  ‘Robert Simpson,’ he whispered, the sibilants hissing and crackling in his ears. He could see the face very clearly in his mind’s mirror, as if it had been etched there: the jowly features of a man whose mask was that of the bluff and straightforward Yorkshireman, but whose true character was far different. It was a face Alan had grown to loathe. Staring into the glass focused it more exactly, as if he were looking through the viewfinder of a camera.

  He knew the right time to set light to the cone, too. Automatically he flicked a match afire, and strange incense filled the air.

  Alan Bellman dreamed.

  Across the valley from him, a valley like a crucible full of clouds - as though he was very high up, although the air was not cold - he could see the wrinkles of terraced fields where tightly curled green crops clung to the steep slope. Higher, the mountains became naked, and on more distant peaks he could see the glint of snow lying in pockets shaded from the noon sun. The sky was an intense cobalt, hard as an intaglio, and cloudless—fading, at the circling horizon, to a blue which was almost yellow. He breathed air like wine, air which had surely never held man’s pollution. Recognising that purity, he filled his lungs, and then breathed out very slowly, relishing it. There was something intoxi- cating in that high atmosphere which came from nothing so simple as an imbalance of oxygen. He felt dizzy with its clarity.

  Leaning on the long staff he held, Alan scratched his chin, and encountered a three-day beard. This puzzled him vaguely, and when he looked down he found himself clad in a rough brown robe like a monk’s habit, and scuffed boots.

  ‘What else should a pilgrim wear?’ asked a voice in his head, and he swung round, startled. The hillside turned ragged as he looked at it, and blew away like clouds in a storm, leaving Alan seated at his desk once more in the darkness of his office. There was a rank and sour smell in his nostrils and a black charred patch the size of an old penny on the desk in front of him. He rubbed it automatically, and the veneer crumbled like dead skin flaking off. Achingly weary, he paused only to open the window, before staggering to his bed.

  In the morning, he felt curiously light and empty, as if he’d just recovered from a bad bout of flu. Kim’s back this afternoon, he thought, and the day brightened.

  Then he remembered the previous evening, and something clenched in his stomach. Had he really put a curse on a man he’d practically forgotten? It seemed ridiculous, now, but frightening too. Still not quite believing how he had spent the evening, he put on a dressing-gown and went into his study.

  The air still smelled vaguely of burnt vegetation, despite the open window, which had made the room rather chilly. Alan closed it thoughtfully, eyeing the desktop and his notebook lying innocently on the polished surface, and the open drawer, on w
hich lay his client’s brief from yesterday. There was no sign on the desk of any scorch-marks, which, Alan thought, was just as well. He rather doubted whether he could come up with a plausible explanation if Kim discovered a hole burnt in his desk.

  He pushed his notebook aside and began to re-read the job he had to do, spreading the art director’s roughs on his desk.

  Some time later the telephone rang, startling Alan into realising he hadn’t washed or dressed and that his feet were freezing. He picked up the receiver, tucking his left foot behind his right knee to warm it.

  ‘Alan Bellman,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, hello, Alan. It’s Alec Griffiths here.’

  ‘Oh, hi. What can I do you for?’

  ‘I’ve got some work for you, if it’s the sort of thing you do. If you want it, that is.’

  ‘I’m like the girl in Oklahoma,’ said Alan. ‘I never say no. It’s the curse of the freelance. What’s the job?’

  ‘My company’s Annual Report. I mean, putting it into proper English.’

  ‘Piece of cake,’ said Alan, shifting in his chair, changing feet to warm the right one this time. ‘Can you fax me details? Then I can give you a price.’

  ‘Right, what’s your number?’

  Alan told him, and put the phone down. Somehow he didn’t want to take on any more work at the moment. It was as if something were nudging commercial concerns out of the forefront of his mind. Absently, he gazed at the page of scribbled copy in front of him, and then jumped as the fax machine whirred.

  Eleven pages to come, said the cover sheet, so he went into the bathroom to wash and shave.

  When he’d dressed in his usual uniform of scruffy tracksuit pants and sweatshirt, he returned to he office to find yards of paper trailing out of the fax. He tore off the curly roll and had just cut it into pages when the phone rang again: it was Kim.

  ‘Hi gorgeous,’ she said. ‘I’ve just checked-in, and the plane’s on time. So I should be at Heathrow by two-thirty.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ said Alan. ‘Have a good flight.’