Black Light

by Bedford, K. A.

  I sat and tried to think. My own belly was protesting. I felt ready to be horribly ill at any moment. I held my head. Mr Nor did not seem threatening, so far. It looked as though I could spare a moment to collect myself.

  What about Gordon, though? He looked in a very bad way, like he’d been gut-shot. I should be getting him to some sort of doctor, I could see that, but to what kind of doctor, and what could I say? He was not bleeding. And something that looked very much like it might have been an elven shaman had pointed some sort of magical device at him.

  Which left me with Mr Nor.

  “Are you … are you Ukresh Nor, the demon?” I said, working to keep bile — and terror — out of my voice. It is not every day one encounters one’s intended assassin, prior to the deed’s performance. It seemed reasonable, in an insane sort of way, to see what information I might extract from him.

  He nodded. He nodded slowly, as though it was a great effort and he would rather not.

  “Do you recognise me?”

  He looked down at me. After a moment, he produced a small notepad and a stub of pencil from a pocket, and, slowly, his great hands seeming to swallow the pencil and notebook, wrote something. He showed it to me: “YOU ARE MRS BLACK.”

  “That’s right,” I said, swallowing more bile, trying to breathe. “I am.”

  He looked at Gordon, but not with any visible concern. Gordon continued to make awful noises. In my mind I was willing him to do some sort of deal with the universe. Anything.

  To the demon, I said, “Someone summoned and bound you, is that right, Mr Nor?”

  He nodded and looked desolate, which surprised me.

  “I understand that this person summoned you to kill me. Is that right?”

  The demon looked concerned for a moment. He scratched out his last message and wrote a new message. “NOT PRECISELY. I RUN ERRANDS FOR HIM.”

  “Errands?”

  Nod.

  “And these errands could include killing me?”

  Nod. He wrote: “IF YOU DO NOT COOPERATE.”

  It occurred to me I had refused to pay the initial, absurd sum of one thousand pounds. That Rutherford was patiently and loyally sitting near my letterbox tonight, waiting for whatever might happen.

  Oh …

  “I have already refused to cooperate, though, Mr Nor … ” I said, my hard-won sense of almost-normalcy dropping away into chilly chaos.

  He wrote: “I HAVE ALREADY ACTED.”

  “Y-you’ve already …?” I was backing away from the circle.

  Mr Nor wrote, “YOU DID NOT COOPERATE. YOU NEEDED A LESSON.”

  “Rutherford … Oh, God … ”

  I wanted to leave. Turning, though, I almost tripped over Gordon. Through his own agony, he held a scrap of crumpled paper in his right hand. He was trying to get me to take it. “Please, Ruth … ”

  Opening it, a torn-off bit of butcher’s paper, I saw that Gordon had written three nonsense words, and the demon’s name, in shaky printed writing.

  Gordon looked up at me. He was dying. It was plain to see. His eyes were losing their focus. He screwed up his remaining strength and said, “Say the words … to him. Now, Ruth … ”

  Looking again at the words, and back at the demon, and thinking about Rutherford, I was not sure what to do. “Gordon … you’re … Do something! Help yourself!” I had not meant to shout at him like that. He struggled to focus on me. “It’s cold, Ruth. So cold.” I could see his breath, feeble though it was.

  “Save yourself! Good God, Gordon, save yourself!”

  “Ruth … I have always … ” He was making an extreme effort now to look at me, in a way he had never looked at me before. There was a fleeting candour in his expression that was new.

  “Please, Gordon!”

  “I’ll be right. I’ll be fine. You … you sort out Mr… Nor … ”

  “Promise me! Promise me you’ll save yourself!”

  “The cost … I can’t … ” He looked so helpless, holding onto a thread of life, and, in his extremity, he was still not prepared to sacrifice his dogs to save himself.

  “Then take something of mine, for God’s sake! Take my good right arm! Take it! It’s yours!”

  His failing eyes almost burst out of his head at this suggestion. “Ruth?”

  “Take the damned thing! I would rather have you back than keep this arm. All right? Is that enough for you?”

  He saw now that I meant it. He was speechless, and looked ashamed. I saw tears forming in his eyes. “Let me … get started. You … ” he gestured to the demon. I looked again at the paper, now a tiny, hard ball in my fist. Gordon’s eyes were closed now. He was mumbling something under his breath.

  Now it was my turn. I went back to the demon. “Mr Ukresh Nor?”

  Again, with the deepest reluctance, he looked down at me. His eyes were somewhere beyond sadness.

  “I need to know your true name.”

  He pulled out his notebook, flicked to a fresh page, and he wrote, with great care, “I CANNOT REVEAL MY TRUE NAME TO YOU.”

  “I understand,” I said, though it must be admitted that my understanding of exactly why this was the case was thin to the point of vanishing. “My friend has given me some words to say to you. Is that all right?”

  Suddenly the demon looked very interested. I saw him trying to see what was written on Gordon’s bit of paper. I was, oddly, reminded of a dog who knows there’s something tasty in one’s hand, and is trying to sniff it out.

  The demon scrawled, “I WILL HEAR YOUR WORDS, MRS BLACK.” He wrote this more quickly than I’d seen him do anything else. For the briefest moment, I thought I saw him bounce on the balls of his feet.

  This monstrosity hurt Rutherford earlier tonight. Remember that. He’ll hurt other people close to you if you don’t stop him. He is a monster. He will kill you, if given the instruction.

  I needed the reminder. The demon had those enormous, square hands. It was too easy to imagine him throttling me as I lay in my bed. I would never stand a chance.

  “Kashlat vio Nytholor, Ukresh Nor,” I said, trying to pronounce the words clearly, and worrying that if I pronounced them incorrectly, they would not work.

  The demon staggered, as if something had hit him hard in the chest — like a train, perhaps. He emitted a terrible grumbling noise that started out so low it worsened my feeling of nausea. Soon it rose through audible registers. I wondered if he was dying.

  I chanced a glance at Gordon. He lay still, with his eyes closed. “Gordon!” I shouted, and moved to run to him — until I saw the faint movement of his chest. He was alive, in some way. It would do.

  Ukresh Nor had slumped to the floor. Kneeling, he looked at me, eye to eye. Taking up his notebook and pencil again, and with his great hands shaking, he glared with concentration as he wrote, “VARIEL”.

  I was short of breath from sheer astonishment. It had worked. Gordon had done it. I now had the demon’s true name. My knees turned to water once again, and I sat down quickly. I tried to re-gather my wits. But not for long. I still had things to do.

  What has he done to Rutherford? I wondered, looking at him. Would he tell me, now I could control him? I did not see why he would not tell me.

  I took a deep breath and cleared my throat. My voice wavering, I said, “Variel — ”

  The demon stood quickly and with admirable rigidity. I was reminded of a soldier coming to attention. It was difficult to comprehend having any sort of power over a creature from another world. It was easy to understand why humans had dabbled in demonology. People were weak; demons, at least ones like this, were strong. Having such a thing at one’s beck and call would be irresistible, even intoxicating. One could have enemies killed or maimed and no policeman in the world would be able to trace the crime back to the source.

  “Variel,” I opened, “tell me what you did to my servant Rutherford earlier this evening.”

  He nodded and began writing. At length, he showed me his answer, squeezed into a blank
corner of the page: “I HAVE DONE NOTHING TO MISTER RUTHERFORD. I BELIEVE HE IS WELL.”

  The shock hit me hard. I wanted to tell him he had to be mistaken.

  But I had only assumed he must have attacked Rutherford. The demon would have gone to my letterbox and found it empty of the money. He would have found Rutherford sitting there guarding it, and no doubt very handy with his revolver.

  A fresh fear began to stir. Rutherford was capable of defending himself. There were others at my house, however …

  “Variel, you said you had already acted, to teach me a lesson.” He nodded, and looked so sad.

  “So you hurt someone in my house?”

  Another nod.

  I asked him if he had hurt any of my staff, and named each one. Variel shook his head. He wrote, “I HAVE NO BUSINESS WITH YOUR STAFF, MRS BLACK.”

  By this point I was baffled. The only person left in my house was Aunt Julia, and she was safe from harm because of Gordon’s protection charm. So who was left? I had no pets.

  I asked him whom he hurt in order to teach me a lesson. Variel looked more desolate than ever. He wrote, slowly, on a fresh page, “MISS JULIA TEMPLESMITH.”

  I should have seen it, the huge gaping risk. The demon had shown it to me himself throughout my entire encounter with him tonight.

  I was now sitting once more, leaning against the wall near Gordon’s unconscious body. I was exhausted. There was a hot blue fire screaming in my head and guts. The fire burned away the nausea, the confusion, and most certainly any remaining “thrill” I might have felt on gaining control of Variel. Now there was only the simplicity and clarity of anger — almost all of it directed against myself.

  Gordon’s protection charm offered protection from “malicious” entities.

  Julia, when she told me about her encounters with the demon in the other world, had told me, in so many words, that there was nothing personal in the demon’s plans against me. It was, indeed, all business. There was no malice. Indeed, tonight all I had seen, though I had failed to take note of it, was that the demon was a melancholy figure trapped into doing someone’s dirty work, work the demon probably would not have done, had he any sort of choice. The very nature of the demon meant he could not refuse the orders of his summoner and master. I could see that now. So he had done something to Julia, and, because of Gordon’s specifically worded protection charm, she had been defenceless.

  I tried to concentrate. I needed to focus. The anger gave me clarity, but not the sort of clarity that allowed for thinking through plans of action.

  So I did not ask just exactly what had the demon done to Julia. Whatever it was he had done, I was in no position to do anything about it. With a little luck, Rutherford and the rest of the staff would have taken the necessary action. In so far as the situation could be said to be “in hand”, it was, at least for now.

  Instead, I asked my tame demon, “Tell me the name of your former master. The man who brought you into this world, and who got you running all those errands.”

  Variel nodded, and he began writing. It did not take him long.

  When he was finished, he showed me the page.

  It was a name I knew. It was someone I knew. Someone I knew only too well.

  It was hard to breathe. My heart galloped. I wanted to ask him if this name was correct — but how could he lie to me? He could no more lie to me than he could defy the specific orders of his former master, even as complying with those orders sickened him with his own notion of regret.

  I did what seemed at the time to be the only just thing. I put aside my impulse to send Variel to wreak havoc on my tormentor as he had hurt me. I could not bring myself to use Variel as he had been used by my enemy. That would have only compounded the sin. Variel needed one thing and only one thing.

  “Variel,” I said, standing up. “I am not sure how to go about this, but I hope it does the job for you. Erm … ”

  The great demon stood there, crisp and smart, alert to my every whim. It was a terrible thing to see. I said to him, “I release you, Variel. I no longer want or need your services. You’re a free … ah, you are a free demon.”

  He looked shocked, full of disbelief. He wrote, “ARE YOU QUITE SURE? IS THERE NOTHING ELSE YOU WOULD HAVE ME DO?”

  “No,” I said, “nothing else. You’re free. Go home. Go.”

  Still, he stared at me. I had a feeling no-one had done this to him before. He had presumably been handed from one master to another for who knows how long, and now he was mine.

  He wrote again, “THANK YOU. I AM SORRY FOR WHAT I HAVE DONE.”

  With that, he vanished.

  The air swirled around, cold and reeking of that stink.

  I thought my troubles would now be over. As I went to Gordon and tried to pick him up, I was thinking how I would deal with my problem. Was it possible I could somehow get Variel’s former controller to confess to what he had done to Julia? Could I involve the police in some way? At that moment, it did not seem likely.

  Gordon was tremendously heavy; unconscious and cold, he was a dead weight. I had to haul him up the two flights of steps into the ruined Cahill house. I am not sure, now, how I got him outside, though I do recall the great difficulty of driving the Tulip through the towering weeds, wet with pre-dawn dew, heaving Gordon into the back of the car, and very carefully easing the Tulip back up towards the road. We were nearly bogged several times. Only judicious use of the throttle lever and brakes saved the day. By the time dawn washed the eastern sky that certain shade of cold metal blue, and the local crows were awake and cawing in apparent protest at the sight of the new day, we were back on the gravel road, and motoring back to town.

  Julia …

  I had been concentrating on the physical difficulties of manoeuvring Gordon out of that pit, concentrating with what probably looked like a frightening intensity.

  At that point I could not falter. I could not give way to my fears for Julia. A natural pessimist, I assumed the worst had occurred, that Variel had done his work thoroughly, if not with any great delicacy. Driving home along quiet roads hardly occupied, the sounds of the Tulip’s motor and solid rubber tyres on gravel in my ears, I did my best to ignore the booming of my heart, and the cold dread pooling in my belly. This night had been exhausting. There had been too many shocks, too much strain, too much terror. And, of course, I was not yet done.

  Should I take Gordon back to his house? Perhaps taking him back to my house was the better course, because my staff could take care of him —

  There was a stirring in the back seat. “Mmrgh … ”

  “Gordon?” I stopped the Tulip by the side of the road. It was so quiet. “Are you all right, Gordon?”

  He was rubbing at his stubbled face, and looked like death, pale and grey. “Ruth, where are we?”

  “We’re heading back into town.”

  “The demon?” He was starting to sit up, his eyes squeezed shut against the morning sun. One hand clutched at his stomach. “What hit me? Good God.”

  “We freed him, Gordon. He’s free. We — ”

  Gordon nodded. “Fine. Good. Could you take me back to my place, please? The dogs … ” As soon as he said it, he remembered last night. I’d seen film of icebergs calving from the side of glaciers. Gordon’s face, ordinarily a sagging, rumpled mess, now seemed to collapse, darkening. His breathing changed. He stared out the window, seeing nothing that was actually there.

  “Gordon, I’m … ” Not turning to look at me, he lifted a hand, as if to dismiss my concern, and perhaps to dismiss me, as well. I hurt all through, seeing that look on his face, and seeing that hand.

  I was glad we were no longer on the road. The dogs. Those poor, beautiful, lively dogs. “There must be something else — ”

  “Please, Ruth. Take me home. It’s all right. It’s fine.” His voice was gentle.

  “Julia’s dead.” It was true that I did not know this for sure. It was possible the demon had only hurt her somehow — a whole world of horrifyi
ng thoughts flickered past at that — but I doubted it.

  Gordon looked at me. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Julia. She … Mr Nor, he — ”

  We sat in our own solitudes, lost.

  I found myself thinking about the elven shaman who’d attacked Gordon. What in the world was an elven shaman doing down in that cellar? I wondered if my enemy, the extortionist, had resorted to elven magic, somehow, in order to construct the gateway between our world and the world of Variel? I thought about the unexplained abandonment of the Cahill property six years earlier, the failed crops. It made a certain insane sense. Nothing one could explain to anyone else, of course, but in the context of everything else happening around me lately, it seemed quite reasonable. I sensed that my future self would be resorting to a very stiff gin and tonic, and don’t worry too much about the tonic. Variel’s eyes, those achingly sad eyes. The way he’d caught me when I fell. His apology. Demons, I was told, were fallen angels. It was something Gordon reminded me about earlier. Yes, I could see it now. I felt sorry for the poor blighter.

  Later, I took Gordon home, his noisy, raucous home. I offered to come in with him, since I could see he was still in considerable pain, and walked stooped over, clutching his belly. He could barely walk on his own. “I am quite all right, thank you,” he told me when I tried to help. I wanted him to scream at me. I wanted him to blame me. God, I wanted him to look at me. We reached his door. The noise of the dogs was unbearable. They were so full of boisterous life. Growing up, back in England, I had known many occasions when it had come time for beloved pets, a favourite riding horse, even, oddly, a chicken, had come to a point when they had to be put down due to ill health. I had always been the sort of child who took it hard. It never seemed fair, even if it was the kindest thing to do.

  I had expected, in a way, that when we got here the dogs would already have gone, as if the forces of cosmic balance would somehow have leaned down into this plane of reality and simply erased them, as they were troubling figures on a balance sheet. But the fact that they were all still vibrantly here, and that Gordon — my God, the poor man — would have to carry out that balancing task himself.