by Chico Kidd
The packet he laid on the table was tied up in a cloth, and he unwrapped it with care to reveal a small painted panel of wood, may be xii inches tall and a span in breadth. And when that I did see what was pictured on this panel I did swear an oath that I’d liefer Catherine had not heard, for all that she’s gone dressed as a boy and come to ringing (ringers not being known for moderate language); but I believe I may be excused my wonder, for the picture was as like unto her as a twin; yet it was not Catherine, for there was that in those painted eyes that I liked not.
-I am not so full of awe as I was yester-day, she said to me, because now I think I do know who this may be.
-Master Eaton, I said, who did paint this picture? for there was no signing that I could see.
-’Twas a man that is now dead, instiled Humphrey Hope.
-Humphrey Hope that was murdered in Fleet-street? I asked, and Rafe Eaton scowled a right grim countenance.
-I’ll make no sale do you noise that abroad, said he, hold your peace.
-You’ll make your sale, said Catherine, for I’ll buy it from you my-self. Mark you I’ll not pay more nor ten shillings.
-Would you make me a bankrupt? he exclaimed, I’ll not part with it for under a guinea.
-Why then keep it; I am not so enamoured of it, said Catherine carelessly .
-xv shillings, for your fathers sake, then, he said.
-Ten, replied Catherine.
-Ah very well, I suppose I am well rid on’t, ’tis yours.
Ten shillings, thought I, but lately that was more than the cost of my lodgings, mean enough though they were.
Catherine gave the man the money and we bore the picture away in his cloth.
-And now, said I, what meanst thou to do with it?
-Marry, said Catherine, the thought comes to me that dost thou and Roger Southwell wish to do battle with the succubus, her image may prove a potent weapon. Now, there is work to be done, and today ’tis ringing-day at Bow, so we must shift to be done in good time.
And seeing her thus, with the wind in her hair and laughing in the face of peril, I did love her the more.
-When shall we be wed then? said I.
And she replied, -By God, as soon as may be; I’ve buried my father and mourned him full well; now I can do as I please.
So I swung her up in my arms and kissed her in the street. And we were wed in Bow-church in May-time, and made as merry as we could, the times being what they are: Yet there was an abundance of oil of barley and clary and burnt claret, and pies and tanzeys to eat.
But it also befell that on that tide (being in that season when that the sun was in the sign of Gemini, that they also call the Twins) I had intelligence from Roger that the time was come that we must act.
And truly the Impact of this Zodiacal sign was not lost upon me for I had long thought of the creature as being Catherine’s dark twin.
At this time Catherine and I were embarked upon the printing of a number of bell-ringing peals, each one to his own pamphlet, with divers methods to lengthen or shorten the number of changes (such as extremes), she having a skill in the figure-work of this art; this did consume a terrible amount of time for proof-reading of the changes pricked out and I have gone cross-eyed doing so, because none but we two could, the men in the shop knowing naught of Ringing. Vox audita perit, littera scripta manet.9
Aboy did deliver Roger’s message sealed in a paper and I gave him a penny. Roger wrote briefly, I’ll come to you this night.
Had the paper contained a poisonous serpent I had not been more apprehensive; I did show it to Catherine, who said merely, -So be it.
-Aut vinceremus aut moriemus,101 said.
But she shook her head: -None shall die, she said.
-Is this a prophecy? I asked.
-God will aid us in this good adventure, she replied, so we cannot fail.
But I could not be so sanguine, being not so confident in the motives of God nor in the powers of Roger Southwell neither.
9 The spoken word is lost, the letter written down will survive
10 We’ll either win or die trying
O lente, lente, currite noctis equi,11 thought I to my-self.
On occasion I do envy those folk who do trust unquestioningly in God, but such beliefs are not a part of mine own nature: I do not see God’s hand in every thing; I do not see it in the visits of the plague, nor in the rule of the Puritans, nor in the death of Ann Pakeman, nor in the beggars in the gutter; lord of misrule, mayhap; not God. An he is not able to prevent such things, why then he is not omnipotent; an he chooseth not to prevent them, then I have no more words to say.
Roger came by at a late hour; dusk stood in the sky and the stars were begun to shine: Fire-folk sitting in the air, a pretty fancy. But on occasion I do conjecture, like that Jordanus Brunus Nolanus of whom I have read, that an all these stars be suns like unto our own, would they not also have planets which go around them; and what manner of creatures would Inhabit such planets; men like us, or beasts, or creatures wondrous strange and like unto neither men nor beasts; nor demons nor angels neither. And how it doth confound the imagination to think how faraway must those suns and planets be.
Still men be clever and in an hundred centuries or more, perchance will have found a way to journey thither; when that they have discovered and understood all things on the earth. What will a man be like in the xxvii century, or even the xx? Very like unto us, I do expect; I do not think that man’s nature shall change; nor do
I anticipate that he will be the wiser than we, for all his learning, for ’tis a part of that nature which is ours that we do not heed the lessons of history: neither our own, nor the world’s.
We did choose to make our experimentation in that room which had been the bedchamber of Catherine’s father (and in which he had died); Catherine and I did not use it but for a store-room; -And besides, Roger said, she hath been here before.
Now it was empty save for two chairs which Roger had bidden us place in’t. he would stand, he said, for his conjuring, and did caution us that ’twould be perilous to move lest we erase some of his magical marks. And he took the painting that Humphrey Hope had made and leaned it gainst the wall.
-Now you must both do precisely as I say, he said; sit you down each in a chair (he had moved the chairs to certain places in the room the which he said were significant); You may speak to one another but do you not distract my attention. Fabian do you hold the scrying-glass, but regard it not until I give the word.
I had told Catherine of this glass but I do not think she was impressed; and indeed when I recall looking in it that other time, there was not much happened.
Roger then did draw a circle with chalk around each of us, saying, This is the circle of Solomon: Nothing evil may pass over’t; but you must rest without moving, and not break the circle.
Inside the circles were some figures and letters inscribed, and around their circumferences he wrote many strange words; maybe they all were names, I did see among them Raphael, Seraphim; then outside the circles he placed litten candles and inscribed more figures around them. After this he made a triangle and wrote a word on each of the three sides; Tetragrammaton and Anephezaton were two of these; I do not recall the third, although I think it began with the letter P.
-This is where she will appear, he said.
Finally he made another Solomon’s-circle about himself; so we were disposed thus, myself in the centre of the room facing to the east where the portrait stood, with the triangle between it and myself, some two-foot from the outside of my circle; Catherine to my left and Roger upon my right. And the magic hung so thick in th’aire I was like to be ill with the sweetness on’t.
II Slowly, slowly, let Night’s horses run slowly (The words of Marlowe’s Faustus as he waits for the devil to claim his soul.)
-Well now, all’s prepared, he said when all these preparations were completed. Now what we must do is this: Fabian do you look in the glass and think on her, as you did th’oth
er time; and Catherine twill be best an you pray in silence. When the creature doth appear within the triangle I shall summon an angel to banish her.
-You said that she was no demon, said I; wherefore then this talk of an opposing angel? Aquila non capit muscas. 8
-But angels do concern themselves with lesser powers in the canon of evil, replied Roger; therefore I must summon the most strongest power of good that I can, lest her power be greater than we know. And some whit of this argument did seem passing strange to me, but I had not the leisure to pursue it.
-Are you ready, Fabian?
-Ay, so much as I shall ever be, I replied, and took up the glass for a second time, my neck a-prickle with magic.
In the depths of the glass clouds roiled and raced, as a wild storm did impel them to break in rags and flee away; I called into my mind the images of Roger’s creature, from the unseen move-ments in vitro, in the glass-womb wherein she did grow, to the night-robed child-woman (child she never was), to the masked and predatory shape that last she took, and the face on the painting, which was Catherine’s but not Catherine’s.
I could hear no sound in the room, neither my pounding heart nor my breathing; I felt like unto a man under-water, in an element not his own, sucking in what was not air but something I could reach out and take an handful of, then mould it as a potter shapes his clay into whatever I did choose.
The room narrowed around me until I thought that I was inside a jar, like unto an homunculus myself; faraway, farther than a man can Imagine, farther than the planets of the most distant sun, a spark appeared in the dark that coiled within the glass; and faster than an arrow, or an horse a-galloping, or the very wind, this spark did travel towards me: I say, towards me, for I did know I was its target, but my gaze was captured by it; and it did grow and wax until that it filled the glass with shining light, a glowing so fair, so pure, that I did yearn for it with all my heart and soul, to the exclusion of all else.
This shining lasted but an instant and then did explode like unto soundless gun-powder, a flare that did shock and blind me so that I did fling up my hands to cover my face, dropping the glass; I heard it fall to the floor with a dull sound which did seem a very long way away; I think I cried out.
A-tremble I looked up, my vision clearing, and beheld standing within the triangle a figure so like unto Catherine that I had to glance to my wife (strange words to think yet, my wife) for to be sure that she yet sat there; then I did look again, and then to Roger, for neither one of them did stir, but were mute and unmoving as statues.
And then this second Catherine spoke, and she said, -You have called me so I knew you would.
I knew fear then, clenching in my belly and bowels, for but a brief instant: she stepped out of the confining triangle taking no heed on it. I stood up, not barely knowing I moved; she came another step and was near enough to touch and to embrace. I took her by her arms which were not merely like unto Catherine’s, they 8 Eagles don't bother going after mice were Catherine’s own; my tarse went stiff in an instant and I pressed her close.
-Kiss me now, Fabian, she said, make me unready; and I was in a fever of desire, and her hands were busy.
As from faint and far-off I then did hear Roger’s voice raised in a shout, -Catherine, he cried.
And then I did kiss her; I felt her teeth sink into my lower lip, but there was no pain. And the next instant someone pulled her from out my arms and flung her aside, and I heard Catherine’s voice crying, -Get away, get away.
A hand seized hold on my arm, and I returned to my senses to see Catherine standing between me and the succubus which knelt on the floor with such hatred on her features I thought the venom of her glance would strike Catherine down like the stare of a basilisk. Roger let go my arm and I stepped out of the useless circle; my mouth began to sting. I put my fingers to the lip; they came away bloody. And seeing the blood then did fear flood in to me.
-Say this prayer after me, Catherine, cried Roger, you must banish her, you are her antithesis; and swift as a viper the creature dove to one side and seized the scrying-glass, which had rolled away from me.
-Very God of very God, I heard Catherine repeat after Roger, lend to me thy power that I may banish this succubus; and I saw that the air in the chamber was curdling again, but ’twas not from the prayer; she was using the summon-glass all the while they prayed, and the name that she did invoke was Beelzebul.
Roger raised up his arms, but the creature did not cease her frightful summoning; some thing very great and very perilous hung just outside the air. she could not see me; I was hidden from her by Roger and Catherine; I pushed Roger to one side, took two paces to her and kicked the glass out of her hands.
At the same time Catherine cried -Sic fiat, amen,2
and the creature vanished from sight with a great noise as of a rushing wind. Catherine and I fell into each others arms, but I did not need Roger’s white countenance to know that what had been summoned, remained, hovering as ’twere on the threshold of our mortal world. that it had not wholly been brought through from wheresoever it dwelt did not mean that it could not be; it was present in potential.
-I do not think I dare to look again in that glass, Roger said, his voice shaking.
-You placed us all in peril, I said, I’ll wager you knew your wards would not preserve us against corporeal evil.
-’Twas all I could think to attempt, he said, not a whit repentant; It worked, Fabian, did it not?
-Perchance it did, said Catherine, but not in the way you intended.
-Not entirely, Roger admitted, I did not foresee she would use the glass; I did not know she would know to, or be able to, having not imagination as do men.
-How can you know that? asked Catherine; for she was made of me, of mine own secret self; who knows but that she shared my desires and fancies also, and but took her pleasures because she could, and in the was that best suited her nature?
And Roger found this unanswerable; but I thought it made perfect sense.
‘“I wonder if this is a contrivance of the Enemy,” said Boromir. “They say in my land that he can govern the storms in the Mountains of Shadow that stand upon the borders of Mordor. He has strange powers and many allies.”
‘“His arm has grown long indeed,” said Gimli, “if he can draw snow down from the North to trouble us here three hundred leagues away.”
‘“His arm has grown long,” said Gandalf.’
J R R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Kim swore at the hearse-shaped Volvo estate which was cruising sedately along the fast lane at just under sixty, and swerved to pass it on the inside; the surge of power from the accelerator was like adrenalin.
Clear of the obstruction, she booted the pedal to the floor and the speedometer needle crept towards a hundred. She had Tosca on the stereo, and was, as usual, accompanying it, but her mind was not on the music. A feral urgency impelled her on to Fenstanton, but her thoughts were elsewhere. She felt like a kaleidoscope, her shapes and colours fragmenting minute by minute to form different patterns.
Fenstanton presented a sleepy fa9ade on a weekday. It seemed profoundly unlikely, preposterous even, that commerce was being carried on behind its closed doors, that such mercenary concerns made their home there. The people in its offices surely could not turn their minds to filing, or accountancy, or typing: the town seemed too relentlessly bucolic. Kim had never worked away from cities, and this gentler pace was another country to her.
She parked in a half-empty Pay And Display, watched a small bus disgorge a handful of passengers on the other side of the road, then headed for James Rendall’s little bookshop. The sudden awful thought struck her that it might be closed, but she shrugged it off and went on walking, passing a greengrocer’s displaying a selection of limp and rather dirty vegetables - hopefully captioned ‘Organically Grown’ - in wooden crates, a chemist’s with oddly shaped bottles gathering dust in the window as if it were still an apothecary’s, and the inevitable shoe-sho
p, before recognising the establishment she sought.
James Rendall was sitting by his elderly cash-register reading a Dick Francis paperback, which he put face-down on the counter as Kim approached. Recognising her, he smiled.
‘Still on the trail of the bells?’ he enquired.
‘No, we found those,’ Kim replied. ‘They were a red herring, I think. What we should really have been asking about was Roger Southwell himself.’
‘Ah. May one ask why?’
‘It’s rather complicated,’ said Kim. ‘I’m not sure I understand it all myself. How... receptive are you to the idea of magic?’
‘Depends what you mean by magic,’ said Rendall.
‘Roger Southwell’s magic. Mainly. And things from the past, encroaching on the present.’
The bookseller looked at her with narrowed eyes, his expression unreadable as a bird’s. ‘Let’s say I have an open but sceptical mind.’
Kim nodded. ‘Fair enough. Southwell, or someone, left a set of clues which led us to find - a certain artefact. This artefact displays qualities which are... inexplicable by any science I know. And I can’t help wondering if Southwell may have found some way to... influence people in the future. That is, now.’
‘Admirable,’ said Rendall, with a touch of acerbity.
‘What?’
‘An admirable display of not telling me anything at all, while seeming to say rather a lot. Have you ever thought of taking up politics?’
A number of retorts flashed through Kim’s mind, but she settled on reasonableness. ‘Mr Rendall, until I know exactly how you’re likely to react, I’m not going to reel off a story that sounds as if I’m barking mad.’ Rendall considered this, then relented. ‘I know enough about Roger Southwell to believe he could “influence people” in the future.’
With a sigh of relief, Kim said, ‘Then you might be able to help.’
She related the events of the past few weeks. Rendall listened without comment. When she had finished, however, he said reluctantly, ‘I don’t think I can help you.’
‘Why not?’
‘This is all quite new to me. I was under the impression that Southwell was primarily an alchemist - to which he added a hotch-potch of bits and pieces from other “concealedarts”. I haven’t got much stuff specifically about him, though - you’re welcome to read what I have. But I don’t think any of it is going to help you, unless it shows you somewhere else to look. If what you’re implying is that your Alan is somehow being influenced by Southwell.’