The Printer's Devil

by Chico Kidd

  -The same? I asked her.

  -Ay, the same.

  -Well, said I, there’s no help on’t for now, we must needs go speak with thy father. (I durst not even contemplate mine own father; I have seen him in a rage, I was sore affrighted of him as a child and did oft-times feel his belt and more than his belt for small petty things that were offences in his eyes; I did not wish to occasion his wrath as a man grown.)

  ’Twas not so great a distance from my lodging to the house of Catherine’s father, the which was also his shop and smaller by as much as half than that of Master Pakeman.

  -Something is wrong, Catherine said to me as we approached; there was a mess of folk in the street and all milling about like unto pismires in an ant-nest stirred up with a stick; I am afeard, she said.

  And in truth I was concerned also for that the crowd did seem to centre upon Master Alsop’s.

  -What’s the moil, I asked a man that was standing by; he knew not; but another turned and said, -’Tis Master Alsop the printer; they say he’s murdered.

  And Catherine cried out, -No, no, no.

  I caught her hand to hold her from running, saying, -Wait, we’ll go together; and she was white like unto chalk; I could not stay her. 73

  I would have staid her from beholding the body an I could, but she was not to be held back, nor spared the sight, the sight I had more than half expected. Her father’s corpse was blue in colour, dry like unto an husk, tumbled like a bottle of cloth in a corner of his small chamber; the knuckle of his right hand was bloody, an he had been in a brawl, and there were blood-stains and smears by the door-jamb, the which made me think on some thing I could not quite recall. And after a time they bore the body away for burying in Pulcher’s bone-yard.

  Then passed many days mightily confused and I cannot order their events in my mind, but I do recall that at one time I stood in Master Alsop’s bed-chamber where his cadaver was found and looked on the bloody marks by the door; And then there returned to me that fancy that I had entertained a long time since, and which I did write down then, anent the patterns on our finger-ends; and I looked close at the marks and indeed that was what they were, smeared and not clear but quite plain did a man but know what to look for.

  An I could discover whose fingermarks these were, they might point their fingers towards the assassin. But I said nothing of these thoughts for I was greatly frighted that they would be the same as Catherine’s, an my suppositions were correct.

  And Catherine being at work that Whitsuntide on her fathers affairs and accounts, he having no heir but she and no kin, I did find ink-prints of her own fingers on a torn paper, the which I took in secret to the others to compare; ’twas as I had feared. ’twas in truth Roger’s creature, that was Catherine’s dark twin, was murdering men yet at large in the city: there had she left her mark.

  ‘And then, abruptly, once more I thought I heard the sound of the huge, soft tread on the aisle, and this time closer to me. There was an awful little silence, during which I had the feeling that something enormous was bending towards me, from the aisle..And then, through the booming of blood in my ears, there came a slight sound from the place where my camera stood - a disagreeable sort of slithering sound, and then a sharp tap. I had the lantern ready in my left hand, and now I snapped it on, desperately, and shone it straight above me, for I had a conviction that there was something there.’

  William Hope Hodgson, The Thing Invisible

  Kim awoke with a crick in her neck and stared into darkness, which disoriented her. She slid off the sofa with a groan and when her eyes adjusted to the cat light she squinted at the clock-counter on the video: 22:03, it said.

  ‘Damn,’ she muttered irritably, turning on the nearest lamp. She rubbed her eyes, rolling gritty particles between thumb and forefinger, then stamped grumpily into the kitchen to brew some coffee. Prowling uneasily around the downstairs while it filtered, she nearly tripped over her camera case, which had been dumped in the hall with the rest of her gear.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she growled. What was Alan up to? He’d never failed to stow her gear away before, sometimes even when she didn’t want it put away. She padded up the stairs, treading carefully on the ones which creaked so as not to make any noise.

  Light crept under the ill-fitting door of Alan’s office, so she eased it open carefully and peered round it. Alan was pillowed on his arms, snoring gently. Pieces of paper covered in his untidy writing spilled out from beneath him; the screen of the word-processor glowed blue by his side. Kim reached over to turn it off, then blinked in surprise: the text displayed was in Latin. She stared at it uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Magia naturalis licita est, &non prohibita.

  ‘Miraculum magnum a Trismegisto appellabitur homo, qui in deum transeat quasi ipse sit deus, qui conatur omnia fierei, sicut deus est omnia; ad objectum sine fine contendit, sicut infinitus est deus, immensus, ubique totus.’

  The cursor was pulsing after totus. Kim stared at the keyboard for a moment as if that would unravel the mystery of how to use the machine, but it didn’t. Unwilling to turn it off, perhaps losing hours of work, she drew back.

  Possibly woken by the sense of a presence in the room, Alan stirred and opened a bleary eye. ‘Wha’s time?’

  ‘Quarter past eleven.’

  ‘Christ, I must have nodded off.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Kim without irony, ‘you must have. What’s with all that Latin?’

  Alan looked at the screen and turned red, like a child caught out. ‘Just something I was writing.’

  ‘Prize Draws in Latin, now?’

  ‘It’s... to do with Roger Southwell,” said Alan, pressing keys. The screen flashed up the words STORING TEXT.

  ‘Oh,’ said Kim.

  Kim frequently remembered her dreams - sometimes three or four or even more on a restless night, if her intermittent insomnia struck. Sometimes they were mere snatches, sometimes full-blown dramas. She was apt to amuse herself by analysing them, but that night she dreamed a really baffling one.

  She found herself in a dim street, the buildings to either side obscured and difficult to see: a sense of menace hung over everything.

  Adocentyn, said a voice from nowhere, which meant nothing at all to Kim.

  Cautiously, she walked down the street, avoiding deep ruts filled with a substance like the grey mud which boils in thermal springs. As she walked, the buildings on either side drew closer together, their upper stories practically touching over Kim’s head. She halted at a corner; peered round it.

  Something lying in the gutter made her heart jump illogically, the way an unexpected wino in a doorway does. Looking closer, she found that it was a bundle of sacking, coarse and stained. Curiously, she poked it with her foot. It felt - loose. Surrendering to curiosity, she squatted beside it, untying the wet cords which bound the sack, and peeled the damp fabric back. The next second she jumped back with an exclamation of disgust, her heart hammering, for the sack contained a corpse which had been dead a long time: it was a little like old bones and leather, with a straggly mass of hair just visible. Kim stood up, grimacing - and then the body began to move, feebly, and a great rush of blood burst out from it.

  ‘Shit!’ said Kim, trying to avoid the flow - and woke up. The moon was looking in through the window with its pale expressionless face (although she could have sworn she’d closed the curtains).

  Well, I wonder what all that was about, she thought. Body in a sack: that’s Rigoletto, and Gilda (‘Mia figlia! Dio! Mia figlia!’1); but why? Failing to find a logical connection, she turned over and went back to sleep.

  When, some hours later, she staggered out of bed bleary-eyed to make the morning coffee, she stubbed a toe on the metal case containing her photographic gear in the hall. This did not improve her temper, and she hopped around cursing for a while; but at least it had woken her up.

  In the kitchen she stood on one leg to massage the bruised toe while waiting for the kettle to boil, staring absently out of the wind
ow and reviewing the previous day’s strangeness. It was not like Alan to fall asleep at his desk, or forget to move her gear, or to be so oddly furtive about what was on his word-processor.

  Kim would have liked to ask him a number of questions, but she had a client at half past nine, which meant she had to be at the studio by nine.

  When she got there, the studio was freezing cold, and rolls of paper surrounded the fax. Kim listened to messages on the answering machine, none of which were of great import, turned on the fan-heater to reduce the chill in the barn-like room—a somewhat optimistic gesture—and examined the faxes, muttering ‘Why—is—it—so—bloody—cold?’ The temperature seemed lower inside than it was out, which was ridiculous.

  ‘Client’ll freeze to death,’ she worried, searching for coffee. Presently the door-buzzer sounded and she found herself greeting not only her own client, the art director from the advertising agency, but the agency’s client as well.

  Kim’s heart sank. Clients on shoots were always bad news. Knowing not a thing about lighting, film or camera angles, they would nonetheless flap around poking their noses into everything, changing their minds every five minutes, and panicking when they saw the Polaroids, which they always imagined showed accurate colour however many times they were assured to the contrary.

  Mickey made an ‘I’m-sorry’ face from behind the client, and Kim gritted her teeth and prepared herself to be agreeable.

  ‘The model’s booked for ten,’ she told them. ‘Now a lot of this is going to be down to the lighting’ - Mickey grimaced - ‘and you won’t be able to see very much till I’ve done some Polaroids. “Weird but not sinister”, is the brief?’ This to the client, who nodded.

  ‘The software package is called MicroMagic,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought new samples of everything, and a little PC - that’s new, too.’ Kim raised an eyebrow at Mickey: she wasn’t used to efficient clients. She was not sanguine that he would continue to impress.

  ‘You got a visual for me to look at?’

  ‘Oh, yah,’ replied Mickey, unzipping her folio case. Her roughs showed a wizard in a tall hat and spangled gown with his hands spread in typical pose, except that beneath them a PC had been substituted for a crystal ball. ‘MicroMagic,’ said the ad. ‘Better than a pact with the devil.’ Kim felt the invasion of a shudder down her back.

  ‘Jesus, it’s cold in here,’ observed Mickey. ‘You a closet Eskimo or something?’

  ‘No, I think the heating’s up the Swanee,’ Kim said. ‘Cluster round the fan-heater, guys. Soon warm up when we’ve got some lighting on set. You want this on one-twenty, Mickey?’

  ‘Yah, ‘s only going in press, don’t need five-fours. Don’t go any smaller, though.’

  It took most of the day to set up the shot: the lighting was complicated, Kim was something of a perfectionist, and the client blotted his copybook pretty soon and nit-picked constantly thereafter. Both Kim and Mickey breathed deep sighs of relief when he departed at four o’clock; so did the model. After that, without the interruptions, they finished within the hour and Kim sent the films to the lab for overnight processing.

  ‘Want a beer?’ she asked Mickey after the model, too, had taken his leave.

  ‘Sure, why not. Thank God that old fart-arse Clive buggered off early. Why is this place so cold? I’ve been freezing all day. It’s like Tales from the friggin’ Crypt.’ Mickey blew out, and her breath stood in the air like mist. ‘Look at that. That ain’t natural, in September.’

  Kim rubbed at her own arms, feeling the lizard-skin of goosebumps through her sweatshirt. ‘It is strange. Here - at least the beer ought to be cold.’

  ‘Frozen solid, more like. Thanks. When d’you expect the trannies back from the lab?’

  ‘Oh, by ten, I expect. I’ll get them on a bike as soon as.’

  Despite the cold, Kim felt a strange reluctance to go home when Mickey had left the studio, but it was too chilly to potter for very long. She broke down the set and packed up as slowly as she could, and was on the point of locking the strongroom door when something made her stop.

  One instant, there was nothing. In the next, she was aware of threat - a threat as tangible as a mugger with a knife, but more. It was an over-reaching threat which filled the air, a palpable presence, and Kim felt icy sweat on her face, cold as if she were about to be sick.

  She backed to the wall, putting it behind her for safety, and looked round. The familiar shape of the studio - lights, stands, backgrounds, milk crates and debris - all was as she had left it. The high ceiling was in shadow. But what she felt was present, not behind anything, but somehow in everything.

  This is damn stupid, thought Kim. And yet it wasn’t. Something was there, wherever ‘there’ was. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the presence was gone. Kim sagged against the wall. Breathing heavily in reaction, she wiped her clammy face.

  He found something, she thought. Alan. He found something in Southwell’s tomb. Or is it that something’s found him? Or me? Something from the tomb?

  At home the only sign of Alan was a yellow Post-it note in her office: ‘New client - Brewer Neal (brokers). Gone for brief.’ and a telephone number.

  Uncharacteristically indecisive, Kim returned downstairs and spent some time in the kitchen manufacturing a sandwich of very thin bread with a very thick filling. Chewing this thoughtfully, she walked slowly upstairs again and stared at the closed door of Alan’s office, wrestling with a sense of control slipping away, of the world gone awry; as if its rules had suddenly been rewritten.

  It seemed to her that the way everything worked had been subtly altered, so that now it was quite natural for Kim to go furtively searching Alan’s office - as natural as it was for him to keep secrets from her; which would never have happened in the world as it had been. Kim sensed, with a profound but unfocused dread, that something irrevocable had happened. Or was happening. Or was about to happen.

  She envisaged a whole series of worlds, each diverging from a path, spreading down like a family tree, branching from paired single ancestors into the ultimately uncountable: the branches occurring where one unforeseeable possibility would prevail, or be chosen, over another.

  So there was now an infinity of possible worlds, and a further infinity within each of those; and something now was different in the particular world which Kim and Alan inhabited. It had diverged from time. Deep inside, she felt an intuition of some strange evolution, a yearning, but for what she could not tell.

  Pushing open Alan’s door, she would not have been in the least surprised to enter a magician’s den complete with hanging crocodile, athanor, and curled alembics. Or to meet there with someone who had not existed a moment before - or who had always existed.

  Consequently the mundane scene which met her eyes, the word-processor and the fax machine, the mailing packs spread on the desk - was for a disorienting instant far stranger still. So disoriented was she, hanging as she was between possibilities, that she almost jumped ten feet when the telephone rang, and her hand hovered over the receiver for what seemed like minutes before she picked it up.

  It was the photo lab.

  ‘Kim?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Dave, at Pix. You know those films you sent in today?’

  ‘Yah?’

  ‘There’s something dead funny about them. I’ve just got the test shots through, and either you’ve got a double exposure on ‘em or else you’ve invented some new technique we lesser mortals haven’t discovered yet.’

  ‘Dave, what the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Can I bike these tests to you now? Then you can see for yourself.’

  ‘Oh God, if you must,’ said Kim. I do hate this kind of thing, she thought. Riddles, puzzles, treasure-hunts. Damn it, how did this ever start? She thought of telephoning the number Alan had left, but irritably dispelled the idea, knowing herself how annoying it was to be interrupted when with a client. Forgetting, for some reason, what it was she had been about to do,
she made her way downstairs, scarcely aware that she was singing to herself:

  ‘Deserto sulla terra, col rio destino in guerra, e sola speme un cor... un cor al Trovator. ’

  ‘Alone in the world, unlucky in war,

  the troubador has only one hope: his heart.’

  It seemed, when she realised what it was, an ill omen. Kim grimaced, and crossed to the stereo to put on something more cheerful. But somehow there seemed to be sinister overtones in all the titles she read, and she eventually opted for silence, whistling softly through her teeth instead.

  At last a leather-encased youth on a motorcycle appeared with a cardboard envelope marked PHOTOGRAPHS: DO NOT BEND.

  Hurrying upstairs, she ripped off the wide brown tape which sealed the package and drew out a strip of three transparenies, which she placed on the lightbox, then pressed the switch. The fluorescent lights beneath flickered on, and Kim stared in horrified disbelief at the shots she’d taken that afternoon. Her first thought was: I’ll have to get them retouched. But on closer examination, she wasn’t sure it was possible.

  Balefully lit from beneath, the ‘wizard’ crooked his bony fingers over the PC: in whose screen squatted an image which, although it was as three-dimensional as a hologram, Kim could not see clearly. She was glad of that: it gave her the impression that her own sanity was a thing to be doubted. She could be sure of a mouth, which quirked as she watched - or so she thought - into the same smile as the model’s. It revealed altogether too many teeth that were more like fangs for comfort. And eyes. Eyes expressionless as a bird’s, or a lizard’s, or a toad’s, staring into hers. Was that a hand, clawed? A horn, there? a hint of scales?

  ‘Bastard,’ she muttered, for no real reason, and snapped off the light. Somehow, the eyes remained, green like a cat’s in car headlights, flat and luminous. Leaning over the lightbox, Kim cursed aggressively, but found this did not relieve the strange sensations whirling and curdling inside her stomach.

  She went back into Alan’s study, then, and stared dumbly at the small smoky glass lying innocently on a frayed handkerchief on the desk - innocently as a black widow in its web. Battle appeared to have been joined, though how she knew that was, in itself, another mystery. Almost as if, in this adjacent world, she had grown another sense. And the tableau before her, her own hands flanking the cloth but not touching it, and in the centre, the glass (neither of which had been there earlier) spelt out a message clear as calligraphy.