by Peter McLean
She came out wrapped in my good white towel about five minutes later and cornered me in the kitchen.
“You didn’t come home last night,” she said, then looked at me and wrinkled her nose at the smell. “Don, what on earth have you been doing all night?”
So I told her all about it, trying hard not to think about how she wasn’t wearing anything except that towel and failing miserably. She sat at the table and lit a cigarette, and listened.
“Oh dear,” she said when I was done.
She crossed her legs, nearly giving me a heart attack as the towel started to come open.
“Trixie for pity’s sake please put some clothes on,” I said, forcing myself to stare out of the window instead of at her.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, if you like. Back in a minute.”
I glared at the yard downstairs, where that fucking hideous cat was sitting there licking its balls bold as brass in a sunny patch under the clothes line. What had Alice said? Something about a travelling cat always being wherever you are, and what the fuck even was a travelling cat anyway? Oh, what did it matter – she was obviously bananas, poor little thing.
Trixie came back in wearing a jumper and jeans.
“Better?” she asked. It was, but only a bit if I’m honest. “Now then, how much do you know about Bianakith?”
“Only what was in the book, and the Burned Man backed it up,” I said. “The Burned Man didn’t seem too keen on it, that’s for sure.”
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “This is an archdemon, Don, not something that could have slipped through by itself however thin the Veils are down there. Which means someone must have summoned it on purpose. Someone very powerful deliberately brought it through, and they must have had a good reason for doing that.”
“To wipe out the gnomes?” I wondered, thinking out loud.
Trixie shrugged. “Possibly,” she said, “but I can’t imagine why. Elementals keep themselves to themselves on the whole. They’re not known for bothering people who don’t bother them first.”
“Well, whatever the reason, I need to do something about it,” I said. “Janice is counting on me, for one thing. They all are. Besides which, I’m not having the middle of London and everyone in it falling into a sodding great hole in the ground.”
“Well do you or your horrible little friend have any ideas of exactly what to do about it?”
“No,” I admitted. “Not yet, anyway. Anything I could send against it would get eaten alive. I don’t suppose…”
“So would I, I’m afraid,” Trixie said, crushing that hope before I could even voice it. “I’m just one soldier after all, and Bianakith is a bit out of my league. I mean obviously I could kill it, but not without ending up like your poor friend Alice and I can’t say I fancy that very much.”
Damn. There went that idea then. I sipped my coffee and watched the cat saunter along the wall downstairs like it owned the place.
“Is there any way we can ask for help?” I said after a moment.
“Help?”
“From, you know, Upstairs,” I said. “From your Dominion, maybe.”
“Hmmm,” Trixie said. “I don’t know. I can try, but I don’t know what the answer will be.”
“Well give it a go if you can, please,” I said. “It can only say no. Look, I need a shower and some sleep then I’ve got that other business to sort out, once I’ve given Wormwood a piece of my mind.”
“Oh yes, your pet charity case,” Trixie said with a wry smile. “Have fun.”
Chapter 6
“Hero?” I shouted in his face. “Fucking hero?! Are you out of your tiny fucking mind?”
“Steady on now Don,” Connie said, looming suddenly at my side.
Wormwood waved him back and lit yet another cigarette.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “You were the best I could come up with in a pinch.”
“You do know what’s fucking down there, don’t you?”
“Not really,” he said, “and I don’t really care. I promised them a champion and they got you. I never promised them you’d be any bloody use.”
I coughed his smoke out of my face and sat back in the chair with a scowl. It was late afternoon and we were in his office off the downstairs bar. His secretary really hadn’t wanted to let me see him, but I had insisted.
“I want that hexring,” I said. “And the rest of it. Now, and for free.”
“Maybe I ain’t got it now,” he said.
“Maybe I’ll treat Trixie to a night out later,” I countered. “We could have a lovely time here. A few drinks, a nice little game of cards, send Wormwood screaming back to Hell, that sort of thing.”
“All right, all right, keep your fucking panties on,” he grumbled.
He unlocked the top drawer of his desk and took out a flat black case. He turned it around on the scrolled leather top of the desk and flipped it open to show me what was inside. The hexring lay on a bed of crimson velvet. It was a six-sided band of glistening black stone about the size of a fat wedding ring, inscribed all over with tiny swirling lines in patterns that seemed to move if you looked at them for too long.
“Get his other crap would you, Connie?”
Connie came back while I was still admiring the hexring. It really was rather beautiful, in a nausea-inducing sort of way. Connie was carrying a canvas bag that was wriggling slightly. A croak floated out of it.
“Toads,” he said proudly. “And, um. The other stuff.”
“Thanks, Con,” I said as I took it off him. I put the hexring back in its case and slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket. “Right, well. That’ll do for starters, but you still owe me, Wormwood. You owe me fucking big time for all this bollocks. And I want your direct line, too. I’m not too keen on your secretary, and she seems to hate me for some reason.”
“Can’t fucking think why,” Wormwood muttered, but he passed me a business card anyway.
I smiled when I saw it had his personal mobile number printed on it. He glowered and opened the Financial Times with a flourish.
“You done?” he asked. “I’m a busy man.”
I left him to it and hung around the closed bar while Connie called me a taxi back home.
Trixie was gone when I got in, hopefully off to commune with her Dominion somewhere. She had told me she needed peace and quiet for that, by which I knew she meant she didn’t want to be under the same roof as the Burned Man while she was doing it. I can’t say I really blamed her, all things considered. I had no idea where she had gone but for some reason I had a mad vision of her standing on the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, arms outstretched to the heavens and her flaming sword in her hand while a single sunbeam blazed down and made her hair shine like spun gold. The poetic effect was only slightly spoiled by me picturing her wearing that towel while she was doing it, but there you go. Can’t have everything can you?
I took the bag through to the workroom and dumped it on the floor, and showed the hexring to the Burned Man.
“This do you?” I asked it.
It nodded approvingly. “Perfect,” it said. “Now go sort those toads and get a little paintbrush, there’s a good lad.”
I gutted the toads in the kitchen sink and mixed their blood with the tincture of mercury while the Burned Man did whatever it was doing with the lodestone. Then it was just a matter of applying the blood and mercury mixture to the fine lines in the hexring while it sat atop the lodestone on the altar in front of the Burned Man. The hexring drank the mixture greedily, absorbing every drop until it was all gone. Not all magic has to be overly complicated if you’ve got the right bits and pieces. And an imprisoned archdemon to help you out, admittedly.
“That’ll do the trick,” the Burned Man said.
I phoned Charlie Page and told him I’d be over about nine.
After the last time, I had the sense to tell the taxi driver to wait for me. I didn’t expect this to take too long and I was buggered if I was getting the bus home aga
in. Charlie opened the door wearing his usual combination of grey and beige, and looking as forlorn as ever. And poor. He still looked very poor too. I sighed.
“Thank you for coming back,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
“I said I would, didn’t I?” I said, as I followed him into his miserable little house.
“I’d have been in so much trouble if you hadn’t,” he said. Funny thing to say really, but I didn’t give it much thought at the time. “Have you got what you need?”
I patted my pocket with the hexring in it.
“Yeah,” I said.
“What are you going to do, if you don’t mind me asking?”
I took the ring out and showed it to him.
“This is what you might call a magic ring, for want of a better word for it,” I explained. “I just need to put it on her finger and she’ll be fine. No more throwing things and breaking stuff, no more screaming, not so long as she keeps the ring on. Then you can get her to a doctor like normal people do, all right?”
“That sounds… wonderful,” he said. He ushered me up the stairs ahead of him. “Go on up, you know the way. I’ve made sure she hasn’t got any bedpans to throw at you this time.”
I opened her bedroom door while Charlie was still climbing the stairs.
Six knives were hovering in the air over the bed.
Six long, wicked carving knives with gleaming sharp blades turned in the air as one to face me. Mrs Page screamed with hatred and they flew at me in a blizzard of steel.
I hurled myself backwards and crashed through the door behind me, the one into the front bedroom. Charlie’s bedroom. I hit the floor with a thump as three of the knives whizzed over my head and slammed into the wall. They stuck there quivering from the sheer force they had been thrown with. The others smashed straight through the front window and shot out into the dark street. I heard an engine start, and a squeal of tyres outside. There went my ride home then.
As I pulled myself up onto my knees I saw the altar under the window. The table was draped in a black cloth, with black candles on it and an inverted cross for the altarpiece. And on the walls, scrawled over and over again in Charlie Page’s spidery old man’s handwriting, filling every inch of space, two words repeated endlessly. Adam says. Adam says.
I spun round to find Charlie coming at me with another knife in his hand. This one was a sharp ritual dagger, the sort of thing I use. He didn’t look anything like as old and frail now, and he certainly didn’t look like he was crying any more.
“Adam says!” he screamed, as he plunged the knife down at me.
I rolled out of the way just in time, starting to panic. I know he was only a little old man but anyone’s dangerous with a knife in their hand, and one thing I’m not is a fighter. I never have been. Fights scare the shit out of me, to be perfectly honest about it. I don’t even know how to fight.
Charlie stumbled past me in his haste and I flailed at him with one outstretched hand. I managed to grab his ankle, more by luck than judgment, and yanked. I only half-tripped him but he lost his balance and slipped, and I snatched at the trailing hem of his cardigan and pulled him all the way down. He thumped onto the floor beside me and lost his grip on the dagger. He was quick as a snake though and he was on top of me before I knew what was happening, clawing at my face with an unnatural strength. His lips drew back from his yellow teeth in a grimace of hatred.
“Adam says!” he bellowed at me, spraying spittle in my face.
There was no way he should have been that strong. I could feel the magic in him, some spell driving him beyond his limits. No skinny old geezer had any right to be that strong and I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long, spell or no spell, but at this rate he was going to kill me before it wore off. I was going to have to do something drastic.
I got an elbow under his chin and shoved, wrestling with him in an unskilled, schoolboy sort of way until I managed to get hold of his hand. I pressed up on his scrawny throat with my forearm to keep him from biting me and fumbled in my pocket with my free hand until I found what I needed. He was still hissing and spitting when I rammed the hexring onto his finger. All the magical strength went out of him at once as the hexring did its work. He sagged limply on top of me, gasping.
I punched him in the face as hard as I could. I know, I know, he was a poor little old man and all that, but for fucksake!
He flopped over onto his back on the floor, unconscious. I sat up with a wince, cradling my hand against my stomach. Fuck, that had hurt. I left him there and went back into Mrs Page’s room. I was careful, but I didn’t think she’d be dangerous any more.
I was right. She was quite dead, poor old love, and looked like she had been for a good long while. I touched her cheek and found she was ice cold. I sighed.
What did that evil old bastard do to you, sweetheart?
I gently took one of the pillows from under her head and laid her down, closing her eyes with my fingertips. I carried the pillow back into the front room where Charlie was still out cold, and stood looking down at him for a moment.
Then I knelt down beside him and pressed the pillow firmly over his face.
No, I’m not in the business of bumping off sweet little old ladies, but murderous devil-worshipers? Yeah, those I’ll kill. I held the pillow down until I was sure he had stopped breathing, then took the hexring off him and slipped it back into my pocket. That might come in handy again another time.
I let myself out.
Chapter 7
Of course, my taxi had scarpered as soon as it started raining blades outside. Just like I had thought. I couldn’t say I blamed him really, but it was a pain in the arse all the same. I walked for a couple of streets until I hunted down a pub to sulk in.
The pub stood in the bleak shadow of the tower blocks and was called the Goat’s Head, of all things, and it didn’t look any more welcoming than the rest of the neighbourhood. It had a flat roof for one thing, and that’s never a good sign in an estate pub. There was a small crowd of sullen-looking smokers loitering around the front door. Tracksuits and hoodies seemed to be the order of the day, I noticed. My suit drew a few hostile looks but no one actually said anything as I walked through the miasma of cigarette smoke and pushed the door open. They probably thought I was a copper, looking back on it. That was a fucking laugh after what I had just done.
The place was the sort of dump you only seem to get in deprived residential areas. There was a pool table with its cloth ripped in two places and a cluster of broken lights hanging over it. The three garishly flashing fruit machines lined up against the wall seemed to be competing with the overhead neon strip lights to see which one could give me a headache first, and the TV over the bar was showing football. Fuck but I hate football. The place’s only saving grace was that it was half empty. It was a dump but it had booze, and that was all that really mattered right then.
The landlord had one of those faces people round these parts call “lived in”, which was a sort of friendly euphemism for “scarred like a butcher’s block”. What a charming place this wasn’t. I bought myself a pint and a whisky chaser and wormed my way behind a table in the corner. I felt a strong urge to have a wall at my back, and not just because of the locals.
Adam says. Fucking hell.
I must admit I was feeling more than a bit shaky. For one thing, I hadn’t killed anyone with my own hands for a bloody long time, but I can’t say I would lose any sleep over Charlie Page after what he had done to that poor old lady. I wondered if she really had been his wife. Anything was possible I supposed, although I doubted it. Reanimating the corpse of your own wife and turning it into a weapon was a bit much even for a Satanist, surely? Still, that was neither here nor there, really.
Adam says.
I should have known that smarmy fucker wouldn’t leave me alone forever.
I necked my whisky and looked round the depressing pub. Just then one of the tracksuit wearers got a big payout on the fruit machi
ne he had been playing. The coins rattled and clattered into the tray in a long stream. He scooped them up and turned gleefully towards the bar, and I caught sight of his face for the first time.
Well fuck me, that was a turn up for the books. I got up and followed him, and leaned my elbows on the bar next to him.
“Hello, Weasel,” I said quietly.
He nearly jumped out of his skin, the poor bastard. Harry the Weasel was an unfortunate little bloke in his early thirties, no more than five foot six and already half bald, with a droopy lower lip and a lazy eye that made him look thick.
He wasn’t, though.
“Mr Drake,” he said, gaping at me.
“What are you doing in this godforsaken shithole, Weasel?” I asked him.
“This is my local, Mr Drake,” he said. “"And if you don’t mind, in here could you maybe just call me Harry?”
I looked at him for a moment
“Nah,” I said. “You’ll always be Weasel to me. I’ll have a large scotch, ta.”
“Yes, Mr Drake,” he muttered.
He took his pint from the slab-faced landlord and reluctantly bought me a double whisky as well. Well, he was in the money wasn’t he? And I knew why.
“I hope you’re not overdoing that, Weasel,” I said. “People will notice. People will notice, and then you’ll get your head kicked in.”
“Yes, Mr Drake,” he said again, looking mournfully into his pint.
I had a feeling that had probably already happened somewhere. You had to be careful about using my little trick with probability. It’s not that powerful, not enough to win the lottery or cheat Wormwood at Fates sadly, but it works well enough to tickle a fruit machine when you need to. The key point there is need to, not every bloody time you go to the pub. That’s how people get suspicious, and no one wants that.
“Step into my office for a minute,” I said, ushering him over to my table. I wriggled back onto the bench with the wall behind me and pointed at the chair across from me. He sat down and sipped his pint. He looked nervous, but then he usually did. “That little trick I taught you isn’t for every day, Weasel. You do know that, right?”