‘Oh. Wouldn’t happen to mean flying saucers, would you?’
Dee chuckled. ‘An apt enough description. You have a pretty wit at times, young sir. And what is known of these?’
‘Not a lot. Meet a bloke called Fisher, ask what he thinks. Can I rest a moment, please?’
‘Oh, ’tis but a few steps now.’
‘Urrg.’
Eventually I staggered through the bushes and collapsed in the middle of a slight grassy dip, enclosed by the crumbled walls. Dee lifted the bag off my back and began setting up his paraphernalia, while I lay gurgling on my face, utterly and totally shriven.
There was that bloody table, in a padlocked case swathed in all those embroidered drapes. They revealed a white-painted surface about three feet square, surrounded by a thick gilt border painted with clusters of what looked like Hebrew characters. In the centre was a great six-pointed star formed of two gilt triangles, what Dee called the Hexagram, with a square at the centre, divided into twelve smaller squares, each with its own character in blue and white and gilt. Like the embroideries, it was beautiful, and it must have cost a fortune. Dee liked to do his enchanting in style.
Muttering to himself, occasionally chanting a line, and every so often pausing to bob and bow to what I guessed were the four quarters of the compass, he bustled around setting his scene, or whatever he called it. I figured the supernatural powers were in for a pretty good show.
He unfolded what I thought would be the tablecloth, but turned out to be a wide square of light canvas, painted with black lines and letters, like a crossword with no blank spaces. I crawled back hastily as he spread it out diamondwise on the grass; I hadn’t forgotten the green-lit pattern on that lonely farmhouse floor. He set up the table, propping up the legs with what I thought were wedges, but were actually other padlocked boxes, apparently containing magical seals. Bob bob, bow bow, mumble mumble all the while.
Then, prodding me gently out of the way again, he produced a jumble of sticks which bolted together to form an enormous pair of compasses. Putting one end carefully in the centre of the Table, he scribed a huge circle in the grass around the dell, marking it in places with a chunk of stone and filling in the line with powdered chalk. This took him a while, because he kept genuflecting and muttering. Once he dropped the chalk and vanished in a sort of personal white-out, sneezing violently.
Then, resetting the compasses and using his staff as a ruler, he extended another six-pointed star into the circle, marking the lines with strips of gold brocade ribbon. Every so often he waved the compasses above his head, with gestures. Mutter mutter, mop and mow; now he was really getting into his stride. He took up the stones marking the circle, and replaced them with low bowls, into which he poured a sort of thick, smelly sludge from a flask. ‘Mummy!’ he exclaimed as I retreated hastily.
‘Sorry?’
‘Mummy paste – brought at great cost from the deserts of Egypt, and ground by I myself. A very fine piece, nearly a whole arm still enwrapped, with many rare balsams and spices. Sovereign for the rheumatics and many other complaints, but also of passing potency in various formulae. As here, with sulphur and naptha and verdigris, myrrh, bitumen and many other substances—’
‘Hi, Rameses,’ I murmured, trying not to gag. Dee sniffed the stuff lovingly, coughed violently – sending a plume of chalk leaping from his beard – and stoppered the flask decisively.
‘I wish you were able to assist,’ he said sadly, ‘or that Brother Edw—It takes much longer thus alone; but we are now prepared and fit to commence our ceremony. Indeed, we should, without delay.’ He looked up. The sun was falling now, a cool disc behind rushing plumes of grey smoke, beginning to be tinged with pink. I hauled myself up, and peered around. There was no sign at all of the Rabbi.
Dee exclaimed testily, ‘Well, well. A few minutes more, perhaps. But we really should make the preliminary Invocation as soon as we may, or there will be no time before sunset.’ Carefully he lifted one bowl off the circle’s rim and stepped inside, replacing it behind him.
‘Er – shouldn’t I be in there too?’
‘On no account!’ he exclaimed, horrified. ‘To be in such an enclave of power would be most perilous for you, leaving you exposed to whatever force may be summoned therein. That is how you first incurred this link, dropping from above on to the Hexagram without breaking the outer ring, which would have dissipated the spell. Cross it not nor break it, at your deathly peril! Is there no sign of your friend the Jew yet?’
It was ridiculous, but I felt somehow exposed and chilly outside that circle, as if Dee was safe in some way I wasn’t. ‘Nobody,’ I said, pacing around the bushes. ‘You don’t think something could have …’
Dee sniffed, the way some people shrug. He was beginning to look petulant, and if he was feeling as cold as I was, I didn’t really blame him. A chilly breeze whispered aimlessly about the trees. Suddenly Dee exclaimed impatiently, ‘Enough! I really must make my beginnings now. My feet grow frozen.’
And, ignoring my protest, he fished out a tinder-box, struck a light and lit a long wax taper. As this flamed up in the grey twilight he carried it over to the first bowl and lit the mess inside. The green flame that spurted up was all too familiar, though it burned lower and less bright as he hastily clapped a perforated lid on to it. Swiftly but with ceremony he lit the others, and was just touching the flame to the last one when a sudden icy gust swirled around me out of God knows where and blew it out.
Then, hard on its heels, came an even stronger blast, and out went the others, in streaks of bitter smoke that made me choke. The bushes bent, even the leafless trees bent and creaked. The chalk puffed up, the brocade strips bulged and lifted as if small scurrying things raced beneath the flattened grass. The cover lifted off one bowl and rolled tinkling across the grass.
‘Recover it!’ yelled Dee, as his beard blew up into his eyes. He grabbed at his paraphernalia as the wind plucked and pushed at it, one foot on the ribbons, one hand on the Holy Table. Riffles like ocean waves rolled across the dense grass, lifting like a cat’s hackles. I grabbed the cover, burned my fingers, danced around swearing, and only Dee’s anguished shout warned me I was on the margin of the circle, teetering against the impossible wind that felt like so many hands pushing me over.
Then against the reddening skyline a shabby little figure struggled into view, in a ballooning gown that threatened to whisk him off skyward like a ragged kite, still clutching at his absurd hat. He waved cheerfully, or that was what it looked like. All at once the gown sank down as if somebody had deflated him, the boiling motion faded from the grass, the trees relaxed and I managed to get my balance. The Rabbi leaned across the bushes. ‘Good evening! A little restless, perhaps.’
Dee was plastering down his wispy hair under his skullcap, which had almost blown off. ‘Ah’m! A certain … disturbance. Not altogether unknown. I confess I was unprepared for a manifestation of such strength, alone as I am. I am grateful for your assistance. The – ah – claviculum Solomonis?’
The Rabbi smiled, hefting what looked like an earthenware tablet in his hand. ‘Idem. I also am surprised. But it underlines, does it not, the truth of what our young friend claims?’
‘It does,’ admitted Dee sadly. ‘The sooner Master Maxie is freed of this, the better. Who knows what next may manifest itself through him?’
I stared. ‘Hold on – what’s this through me stuff?’
The Rabbi blinked. ‘Were you not aware of it? But of course, you would not see so clearly as I did. The grass, the trees – you were the source of that demon’s wind, my son. From whatever shadows it was summoned, it blew through you. There is enough of them in you to be its conduit. Well, I must not linger here. I have preparations of my own to make.’
‘Guard yourself as well as Master Maxie,’ said Dee unhappily. ‘If … what you suspect be true, there may be more to fear, and as much from man’s hand as beyond nature.’ I began to protest, but he shook his head firmly. ‘Hold you here
upon this spot now, young sir! Upon your peril do not move, or speak, or do aught without I command you.’
Dee carefully smoothed out his brocade strips and cloths, retrieved the bowl cover and began relighting the bowls, this time without incident. The Rabbi, with an amiable nod to us, retreated to the edge of the trees, and kneeling down among the stones, he began to trace figures of his own on the ground. I could just hear him singing under his breath, a high, keening sound that suggested things eastern. Dee, meanwhile, had begun to stride around the circle with his staff held in one hand, pointing to each smoky bowl in turn and chanting, bowing slowly and deeply now. It was Latin, I realised, as my ears grew used to the sound – very slow and sonorous. I caught about one word in three, but enough to know it wasn’t ordinary book-Latin – probably what they called monastic, with a style and a vocabulary of its own, the sort that survived in church services, plainchant, that kind of thing. At first the Rabbi’s nasal singsong made a daft sort of obligato to Dee’s rolling grandeur, but after a few minutes that seemed to fade away, and when I glanced around he was wandering off, leaving only his scratchings in the turf.
It was cold and it was boring, and I was beginning to want a leak rather seriously. Dee droned on, and I didn’t dare interrupt him. And then, after a while, I began to realise that the wind was back; only this time it was blowing from a definite direction, across the city from the east, and in the last faint glow of the sunken sun black clouds were riding it. Ragged hag-tatters, they raced together, trailing thin veils of misty drizzle around the spiky spires, and advanced upon the hill. The gusts flicked nastily at Dee’s robes, and whistled their way under my coat and into all my remaining nooks of warmth. I stamped and swore – under my breath, in case it got into Dee’s spell.
It was as if I’d aroused a sleeping beast. Underneath my foot the ground heaved and sent me staggering, almost to the circle’s edge. The bushes rattled their dry stems warningly, and the grass in the dell convulsed, not in windrows now but in great pulsating shivers that shook the earth and sent stones rattling. Voices groaned under the ground, moans of tortured stone. I stumbled this way and that, struggling to keep my feet; but though puffs of chalk were jolted from the circle’s rim, nothing moved inside. Dee and his bowls and table stood firm, while his words rolled out into the whipping air.
The rain came and went in brief, fierce flurries. One moment there were the steep city roof peaks, gleaming blackly in the last low rays, then a grey wing beat across our eyes with stinging force and everything vanished. Within the cloud lights moved, faint marsh-gas glows leaping overhead from side to side, and long, shimmering shadows that loomed up like grotesque stiltwalkers and were instantly gone, and the rain after them, spattering and trickling off the drenched leaves. It had become hard to breathe, suddenly, and I panted. Dee never missed a word, that I could hear. There was an instant’s lull, and then another gust, a worse one, with a howl that could have come from an open mouth. The ground still shuddered, not all at once but suddenly, just as you relaxed, and I heard stones tumble from the ruined walls.
Then the rain seemed to lift, literally, like a curtain. I found myself looking up at Edward Kelley. He was standing on the top of the walls, wrapped in the green robe he had lent me; but across his shoulder ran a broad sash of some fine material, painted, like Dee’s cloth, with signs in squares. Across his other shoulder lay something heavy and grey, a sack maybe; and he too carried a staff, a great cudgel-headed thing with a band of yellow metal about it. His face was a grim mask, expressionless as I’d first seen it, but even his stance showed me the fury that burst inside him as he saw me.
He was fast, as always. In one brutal wrench he hauled the heavy mass from his shoulder and swung it high above his head, with a sweep of his burly arm that set it spinning; and then, like a sling, he let it go. Out into the air it sailed, and as it flew it spun and opened out like some kind of jellyfish. Down over my head it settled, and with the last of its momentum whirled me off my feet. I fell sprawling, clawing and scrabbling at the imprisoning thing. It hardly seemed substantial, yet it bit into my fingers and wouldn’t tear. It was a net, gauze-fine but made of silk, I guessed, with weights around the rim so it could be flung like a bolo.
But why? I’d be out of it in half a second.
It was then I saw the markings painted on it, and realised why it was circular. The border, the triangles, the characters – the same as that bloody table. He’d trapped me right in the centre of a Hexagram; and abruptly the air was full of green light.
I screamed and struggled with the entangling threads, but they clung tight around me, sucking down against my face with every breath. Dimly I saw Kelley spring down from his perch and stride towards me over the heaving ground, staff outstretched.
‘Redidendum est!’ he screamed. ‘In loco sacrificium sacrificatus est! Venite, venite, potentissime, recipite, redone, refulgete!’
‘Help!’ I disagreed. Something like that, anyway. The silk billowed above me, and suddenly that ring of faces was leering down at me again, all too familiar – the dark-eyed women, the moustached Oriental, the crag-faced pirate type, the black guy and the rest. Now, though, their faces were all I could see, hanging in the brightening glare. With every pulse of it they changed, shifting and blurring into goggling gargoyle caricatures of themselves, eyes rolling, mouths working as one. The livid lips smirked back over dripping teeth no longer human, no longer animal even, jagged, filthy, terrifying things. Out of those gaping, bodiless throats came the same cold cry that had terrified me that night in the empty fields, hungry, dismal, devouring. Around me they spun, the wailing faces, faster and faster into a dizzying blur. I threshed against the net, but it was useless. Above me stood Kelley, straddling me with his staff upraised, crowing deep in his throat.
‘Refulgete! Redite! Unto your true master!’
The staff swept down.
And flew apart. It broke like a rotten stick against the massive hand that thrust into its path. Kelley screamed hoarsely as it clutched the scruff of his robe and lifted him screaming from the ground. The blur tightened and dwindled in an instant, shooting back and shrinking into an infinite glaring distance – or depth. Then with colliding suddenness there was darkness, hot and shimmery, and deep within it a glare erupted, shifting from sickly green to boiling crimson and back again. The eyes of my nightmare flicked open.
Now for the first time their raging light was so strong it lit up the rest of that face more clearly, hairy, bestial, with an outthrust wolfish muzzle and licking, slavering tongue. Yet beneath that scanty pelt the outlines of the writhing features held a deeper horror still, for they were a nightmare compound of shapes half dissolved yet still recognisable.
Later, when the nightmares came back, I remembered Arcimboldo’s portrait, and the other one, the secret one Kelley had seen; and I wondered just where he’d been getting his ideas.
Those slanting eyes were made of women’s bodies, naked, twisted into cruel arcs; the light blazed out through their milky skin. The nose, the cheekbones were the bent bodies of men. It was their pale flesh that formed the face before me, their billowing hair that pelt. No part of that face that was not made up of them, splayed and tormented into unlikely shapes; and, worst of all, there were suggestions, a stray arm here, a half-hidden curve of thigh filling a gap elsewhere, that there were other figures hidden beneath. They writhed, like fretful sleepers, and the expression changed. The snout lifted in a triumphant leer, a tongue lolled out that was a woman’s body, barely recognisable under the wash of slime. The steaming jaws spread wide to devour me.
Thud.
A massive toeless foot stamped on the net an inch from my head. Another huge hand closed over its edge. A deafening howl of rage echoed between earth and sky, but the hand plucked up the net with an effortless ripping force that shot me right out of it and spun me over in the wet grass.
I didn’t mind. I was laughing hysterically. I managed to stop, though, tilting my aching head back into th
e coolness. I looked up at Kelley, kicking frantically some eight feet in the twilit air, as immovably clamped as I had been. The net lay crumpled and torn at my side, and the vision had gone with it. Thunder crackled in the distance, and blue flickers lit the clouds.
‘Thanks, Adam,’ I said. And the damn thing ducked its head, as if to say, ‘You’re welcome, I’m sure.’
I don’t remember very much for the next few minutes. When my head cleared I was on the ground still, but sitting up, with the rasp of cheap spirit on my tongue. Rabbi Loew was looking at me and nodding sympathetically; while behind him Dee and Kelley were exchanging words. Pretty hard ones, too. When an insistently calm man gets angry, he doesn’t know how to handle it. Dee was weeping and shouting simultaneously, and shaking his fist in his brother’s face, when he wasn’t spraying it with saliva. Kelley, his head down between his shoulders like a bull about to charge, was roaring and bunching his free fist as if to thump the Doctor; but every time he raised his fist the huge hand jerked him back by his other arm, ignoring his streams of profanity.
‘So you’re back with the living, eh?’ demanded the Rabbi.
‘Sort of,’ I admitted grudgingly. ‘Oh God. God, that was close, wasn’t it?’
‘Some. He had assistance, some very low sorts of hireling, and it took a moment for Adam to deal with them. They are sleeping peacefully back there on the hill; and I do not think anyone need trouble to awake them again, unless it be this forgiving Nazarene of yours.’
A few spots of rain were falling again, more gently. I swigged greedily at the stuff – peach brandy, maybe. ‘And – is that it?’
The Rabbi considered. ‘Most likely it is. They are not destroyed, those creatures; that would take a greater strength than mine, far greater. But, yes, the link is broken, certainly. They cannot now tempt you with their power, nor stretch their arms out to pursue you. Here you are barred to them. And once back in your own time how shall they ever find you again? Here, drink some more of this. Then we must part your Brothers – Adam!’
Maxie’s Demon Page 26