“The summoner must know a safe route through this place,” Gordon said as he looked around. We stood in the central hallway of the house, off which doors to all the rooms could be seen, at least in our faint glimmering light. It helped us see where the floorboards had either rotted away or been taken away by people looking for free lumber, and we could see where walls were crumbling and would not support us if we leaned on them. Worse, the entire house felt alive with what I suspected were very active insects, spiders and presumably nervous rodents. With each hesitant step, I heard things scuttling and scrambling out of our way — and what I was sure were other things coming to fend us off. Gordon, however, was unconcerned. When I asked him, he said, “I wouldn’t worry too much, Ruth. Most of it’s illusory, courtesy of our friend the summoner.”
“It might be illusory, but I can feel these illusions in my hair and down my neck!”
Gordon ignored me. He was studying the floor with great care, and placing his feet in particular places, even where it looked very much like there were no floorboards. He advised me in a tone I had never heard from him before, “Only step where I step. I can see the summoner’s path and you can’t, all right?” And saying this, he took two small, precise steps across empty space. Under what was left of the floor, I knew, was only about two or three feet of relatively empty space and then the ground. It was not a great fatal fall that I feared; it was slipping or crashing through in such a way as to break my legs. I kept my eyes on Gordon’s feet, and did my level best to match his steps, even though my legs and back were cramping up with the strain of it. In this manner we worked our agonising way towards the kitchen, which was located in the centre of the house.
There was no floor in what had been the kitchen.
Gordon had explained that the shadow glamour enhanced what feeble light was already available, which was why it worked outside and in the kitchen of the Hawkins house, but not in the cellar, where there was none. By that logic, we should have been able to see down into the pit before us, even if faintly. But we could not. The pit was as dark as the Hawkins cellar had been, and somehow seemed darker. I had been shivering, but now I was almost convulsing I was so cold. “H-how do we g-get down there?”
Gordon was trying to warm his hands in his armpits. “I don’t recommend jumping, I can tell you that right away. I have no way to determine the pit’s depth.”
I found a loose, rusty nail and tossed it in.
The nail never struck bottom, as far as I could tell.
“This has to be the place,” I said, wishing very much I had stayed at home.
“Oh, it’s the place all right.”
“What do we do next? We didn’t bring any rope or … ”
Gordon lit his lamp. Once it was going, he crouched on our tiny patch of safe ground and waved it out over the gaping square hole. The lamp’s light was swallowed whole. He swore.
With the lamp’s shutters wide open, he reached out over the edge of the pit, and waved his hand around below floor-level, looking for something. “Ah,” he said.
“Ah?”
“A step.”
“A step?”
He stood up, holding the lamp in his left, gloved hand. “I think I’ve found a way down.”
“But we can’t see the steps.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Sitting up in bed at home, reading a good book!” It occurred to me that Julia was probably doing just this. Now she would have enjoyed all this tension and anxiety. I only wanted it to be over.
Gordon smiled at me. “You’ll be fine!”
This was not reassuring. All the same, and feeling as though I might fall to my death at any moment, I followed Gordon’s advice. Down on the safe bit of floor, on hands and knees, I started climbing down the invisible steps and into the frigid, lightless depths.
24
With extreme care, we crab-walked our way down these phantom steps. Gordon went ahead, the handle of the lantern gripped in his teeth. It threw out a yellow light that did not so much fail to illuminate as that the illumination was stolen by the surrounding darkness. Gordon also kept muttering at me, with considerable difficulty, to please stop kicking him in the back of his head.
Minutes later, we had still not reached the floor. Instead, we had found first one corner landing leading to another flight of steps, and then still others. I managed to keep a rough count: we had descended more than fifty steps and four landings. Peering up revealed only the faintest suggestion of a smudged silvery illumination, concentrated in a small square, perhaps the size of a stamp. My hands, wrapped in thick leather gloves, ached with the cold. I fancied that the invisible steps were constructed from ice. My shoulders, knees, upper arms and legs all ached with unfamiliar exertion. From time to time I needed to stop and rest, but the steps felt so insubstantial that it was too easy to imagine them melting away or simply collapsing if one stayed too long in one spot. And, in the air itself, rasping in and out of my lungs, something smelled awful in a way I could not quite place. There was another faint aroma, too, which was familiar: it was the mysterious “other” smell from the notes, the scent we had tried to identify but could not. It was here, whatever it was. I asked if Gordon had noticed it.
He said, “It’s like a sort of mildew sort of … rather a sweet odour … ” I could hear him struggling for breath, too. And this was the easy part, going down these endless steps. Climbing back up, I knew, would be far harder.
“It’s not any sort of rotting meat stench, or anything like that,” I said.
“No,” he managed to say, with a firm casualness that surprised me.
We kept going. With ten landings passed, and with no hint of light from above, I started wondering if we had stumbled into a trap. Perhaps I should have wondered this earlier, but I had not. I had been too busy counting steps and landings and gritting my teeth against the muscle pains. When I asked Gordon if we might be caught in such a trap, he said, “Poshibly. Hld n a mmnt.”
He took the lantern’s handle out of his mouth. “I say, that’s much better,” he said. “As for the possibility that we’re caught in a trap — I fear you may be right. If so there’s only one thing to do.”
“I know just what you’re about to say, Gordon,” I said, and felt the icy dread rising through me. The only thing worse than inching our way down these lightless steps this way would be jumping out into the void, hoping for the best.
“The best way to beat a fear, Ruth … ”
I had stopped my descent and now sat, awkwardly, with my legs dangling into the pit. The prospect of leaping into that pit, having faith in …what, exactly? The perversity of evildoers? It seemed to me the obvious thing to do would be to make the pit just as bottomless as the steps. “Perhaps we could climb down a little further,” I ventured, keeping the shivers out of my voice. My teeth desperately wanted to rattle together in my mouth.
Gordon waved the lantern over the pit. Nothing had improved there, either. The darkness stole the light. He said, “Well, if we’re going to do this … ”
“You’re not going to leave me stuck here, Gordon Duncombe!”
I could feel wafts of cold air rising from the pit. My lungs burned with the cold.
“One of us needs to test the theory, though, and I’m the logical candidate,” he said, not sounding too worried.
“Is there nothing magical you could do that might help us?”
I could barely see, in the eerie ghost of light left in the immediate area around the lamp, the outline of part of Gordon’s face. He looked reluctant. “I’ve got quite a debt going already, Ruth.”
“Even so, Gordon. I mean, if we’re stuck in a magic trap, surely we should use — ”
“Ruth, you don’t understand. It costs me, to do things. That protection charm only cost me a lock of my hair. That’s not much of a change to the fabric of the universe. To fix this problem, on the other hand, I’d need to break what’s probably a very powerful enchantment. It’s a different
order of cost. The sacrifice rises to the point of severity. As it is, I’ve already had to … ” He broke off, unable to speak further. When he resumed, he spoke with great, slow, caution, a word at a time: “I can’t lose more, Ruth. I can’t. It would be either one of them, or … pieces of me. I can’t do it, I just can’t.” I heard him discreetly wipe his nose.
We sat in silence. I did not ask him what he meant by “one of them”. I knew how he loved his dogs.
Later, sounding perhaps too confident, even a little rash, he said, “Well, here goes nothing!”
“Gordon?” The darkness choked my scream.
He jumped.
“Gordon?” I had not heard him hit anything. He had not called out as he fell.
He had left me alone. Terror took hold. I found myself pressed against the wall, as far as possible from the abyss. Clinging to the frost-slick surface.
“Gordon!”
There was nothing else for it. I could keep climbing down these infinite steps, or I could follow Gordon. The thought of staying put, terrified out of my wits, was not acceptable. I took a deep, cold breath — and jumped into black nothingness.
Gordon’s voice came as if in a dream. “Here, let me help you up.”
It was another trap. I refused. I was on some kind of ground; a solid floor lay beneath me. I did not recall how I got here. My eyes were squeezed shut. It felt like a long time since I had heard from my heart.
“Come on, Ruth. It’s all right. Really. It’s just me.”
My teeth were rattling to the point of shattering. Hard coughing had set in. I was curled so tight I could not imagine standing upright again.
“Just open your eyes. It’s all right. Look, it’s all right. It’s the floor. We’re on the floor. Look! There were only the two flights of steps, and we were going around and around … ” Then he said, in a quite different tone, “Come on, Ruth!”
He’d never raised his voice like that, and that surprise made me open my eyes, just to see what was happening.
Gordon hunched before me, one gloved hand on my shoulder. I saw that I was pressed tight into a dark corner of a small, square room. There was light down here, but not any kind of light I understood or recognised. There was a quality to it, as if we were deep underwater.
The centre of the room contained a glowing circle, perhaps two yards across. I could smell it. It had that strange smell from the notes. To one side, I saw there was a small wooden table, painted a colour that might have been blue, the paint peeling with age, on the surface of which sat an old typewriter; on a shelf beneath lay a packet of octavo bank typing paper, and some typewriter maintenance tools I recognised only too well.
As I was about to point out the typewriter to Gordon, I saw him peering at the walls all around the room. Made of stone blocks, the walls were painted and etched with small, intense writing. Gordon said it was an occult script, one he did not recognise, but which was likely the spell used to create the circle; that the entire room was a magical construct, in effect. “I shouldn’t look at it too closely, or for too long, Ruth.”
He helped me stand. The pain was remarkable. Something in my head boomed and boomed.
The ceiling pressed down on us like a winter sky threatening storms; there were perhaps only a few inches of clearance. It did not feel like standing in a room so much as being trapped in a box. Then I looked up again at this ceiling. I saw that perfectly ordinary stone steps led down here from upstairs. Gordon said that, in some ways, being on the other end of an enchantment was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
It was still extremely cold. Even in this peculiar light, I could see my breath, but it seemed to plume differently. It was unsettling to see.
“So,” I said at long last, “here’s the circle Julia saw.”
Gordon had not ventured near it. “Can you feel it?”
I could feel something terrible going on just behind my conscious awareness, a sensation that what I perceived with my ordinary senses was only the merest hint of what there really was here. I had never quite understood what Julia meant by her “other bits” of reality — until now. I had a profound sense that my ordinary faculties were, in some ways, blinding me to some greater, bleaker truth.
My head hurt so much I was almost in tears. I imagined I was not made to comprehend experiences such as these.
Gordon appeared seasick: pale and clammy and very cautious in his movements.
“Gordon? Are you …?”
He swallowed and tried to breathe through his mouth. “It’s just a little difficult, being close to a point of contact between the … the brain isn’t sure if it’s here or there … ”
“We should go then.”
“No,” he said. “No.”
“Gordon, you look terrible!”
He fished from an inside pocket a small paper envelope. His hands shook.
“What’s …?”
“Take this. You don’t need to know what it is. It’s better if you don’t. Here, take it.”
I would far rather have taken hold of an electric eel, but I took the envelope. It felt light, as if it were filled with the finest dust. I could not reliably describe the smell; it changed by the moment, erasing the previous impression with each new one.
“You need to pour this into the circle.”
My head howled. “Into the circle?”
“We need to see Ukresh Nor, don’t we?”
We did, if we were to extract his true name, and with that to extract the name of his summoner, my tormentor — or tormentors. Yet at the moment this did not seem such an important goal. All I wanted was to take one of my antique trap-shooting guns and blow my head off. My insides were in turmoil. And at any moment, I would need to be quite unladylike in front of Gordon. It says something about how little had really changed in the deepest parts of my mind that I felt waves of incipient embarrassment at this mortifying prospect.
“This,” Gordon said, picking slowly through his words, and nodding towards the small envelope, “will get his attention.”
“We really are going to do this, then.”
“Yes,” he said. “And the sooner the better, if you take my meaning, Ruth.”
I looked at the circle; it was emanating an unsettling black light. “Wish me luck.”
“You don’t need luck. You need strength.”
I took two steps towards the circle, and felt something like an underwater current push back at me. The current worsened the pain in my head, and deepened the turmoil in my belly. I managed to swallow back the first few attacks of vomiting. The bitter taste of bile helped clarify my thinking.
Gordon was calling after me, urging me on, standing well back, his hands on his knees, and he was breathing very hard.
Telling myself I was doing this for my own ultimate benefit, I pressed on. The currents pushed at me again, and tried to spin me around, tried to confound me. Focusing on the evil light rising from the circle, and that intense stink, which now made me think of flowers, but not any blossoms of this world, I kept on, taking tiny but firm steps. The circle loomed ahead. Reaching out, I saw that I was close enough. Two more small steps. More buffeting, more confusion. Nausea like an ocean storm through my body and mind. Keeping one hand clamped over my mouth to catch the surging bile, I leaned into the circle. The circle, I saw, was a drain, swirling with something alive, a throat; I heard it gurgling in the back of my mind.
I upended the paper envelope.
Some kind of water — gallons of it — poured out, and kept pouring as I stood there. Stunned, feeling on the verge of collapsing, I watched a river of water crash out of the envelope and fall down into the living drain between worlds.
The black light flashed into nothingness, knocking me backwards, dazed and stunned. The circle became an ordinary circle painted in something that might have been blood on worn flagstones. Faint light shone down into an ordinary cellar — and I saw the writing on the walls unwriting itself, as though dozens of busy unseen hands were
working at it, in every part of the room.
Gordon gasped, suddenly, and pointed at the far corner.
An elf stood there, but not one we had seen before. This one was different. He had the same peeling, translucent skin, covered in tiny spiral tattoos, and that same deathly look about him as if it was all he could do just to stand up, to keep his huge head from lolling to one side. But where the other ones we had seen had horrible white eyes with pinprick irises, this one had no eyes at all, as if they had been scooped out of his sockets. He wore, incongruously, a black felt bowler hat, not quite the right size, no doubt stolen, but was otherwise naked, and piteous with it, no more than skin and only too visible bone through that wrinkled tissue of flesh.
The eyeless elf pointed something at Gordon. In the weak light, it looked like a triangular device made of sticks and black feathers.
“Good Christ — ” Gordon said, his voice faint and tight, as he dropped to his knees, clutching his belly.
When I looked back at the elf, he was gone.
But Mr Ukresh Nor had arrived.
25
The demon stood in the circle. He wore dark trousers held up by braces and a cheap-looking brown shirt. His shoes were brown, and looked worn, as if he’d walked a thousand miles in them. He looked like a middle-aged man back from the War, where he’d seen too many terrible things. And his hands — I had never seen such enormous hands. The sight of them, having heard about them from Julia, was shocking. How could a demon look so much like a man, yet have such hands? He pointed his eyes at me but did not look at me.
His mouth was stitched closed.
My knees gave way.
The demon caught me and helped me to the floor without hurting myself.
His giant’s hands were rough, and cool.
He had that smell about him, like a cologne.
I looked at Gordon. Gordon was curled up, on the floor, clutching his belly, not speaking, in profound pain.
Now what? I said to myself, trying not to panic. A lady must maintain her poise no matter the provocation, after all. Where that had come from, I did not know. It sounded like my mother.
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