by J. R. Wallis
Looking down, Jones saw he was standing inside a circle of bloody runes and symbols drawn on the floor, and he knew they were producing some sort of magic, preventing him from going anywhere. Through the haze, Jones could see a particularly hairy Woodwose, slightly larger than the rest, intoning a sombre prayer as blood glistened in markings on his tiny face. Other men were standing listening with their arms raised, and then they began chanting too.
The bedroom door slammed open and, through the haze surrounding him, Jones saw Ruby with the old stand-up vacuum cleaner whirring beside her. The grey bag was bulging and Jones realized why as Ruby pointed the metal nozzle at a couple of tiny men racing towards her and vacuumed them up. Ruby smiled triumphantly as she made her way towards Jones, sucking up more men as she went. But her expression changed immediately when the bag suddenly burst with a BANG! and a big group of Woodwose came tumbling out onto the floor, coughing and spluttering in a cloud of dust.
As Ruby stood beside the vacuum cleaner, trying desperately to bash some of the hairy men with the nozzle, Jones hammered and kicked at the haze encircling him. But he only succeeded in stubbing his fingers and toes.
As the Woodwose began chanting louder and louder, Jones slumped to the floor and awaited his fate. He put his head between his knees when Ruby’s face loomed up on the other side of the haze. He didn’t want to see her. It was all her fault. She’d wanted to Commence and he was paying the price for her foolishness. If he was to be given the gift of magic then the first thing he’d use it on would be her, to make Ruby pay for what she had done.
Ruby hammered on the hard barrier surrounding Jones as a point of white light appeared above his head. She banged harder, trying to break her way in.
She screamed at the Woodwose, pleading with them to stop what was happening. But they took no notice. As the white light above Jones shone brighter and brighter, she slumped down next to him as if the guilt inside her was too heavy to bear. Beside her was the hole in the floor she’d used to pull up the floorboard and steal the key. She wished she could rewind time and never have taken it.
And then an idea clicked on inside her.
Quickly, she wiggled her finger into the hole and pulled up the section of floorboard on which bloody runes and symbols had been painted, then threw it behind her where it landed with a crash.
Jones looked up. When he realized Ruby had broken the ring of runes and symbols, he put out his hand and found a gap in the haze directly above where the floorboard had been. He pushed his hand through further and Ruby grabbed it and pulled. But the gap was only as wide as the missing floorboard, meaning Jones was too big to fit through. As the chanting in the room grew louder, the white light above him grew ever brighter and then suddenly engulfed him.
Ruby felt a terrible burning sensation travel from Jones’s hand to hers and up her arm and her shoulder into her neck and then into her head. It was so painful it felt like a red-hot poker had been placed against her brain and she saw strange symbols burnt into the backs of her eyelids. Above the rushing sound in her ears she heard a high-pitched scream and she knew it was Jones. But she was screaming too.
They were crying out as one.
NINE
When Jones opened his eyes, he had to wait for the bedroom to stop spinning.
As the room ground to a halt, he realized he was lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling. Glancing to his right, he saw Ruby next to him, steaming gently like a just-boiled kettle. Something deep and dark opened up inside him and for a moment, overtaken by rage, Jones hoped she was dead, and then she groaned. As soon as Jones realized they were still holding hands, he let go immediately.
‘Are you okay?’ mumbled Ruby.
‘I’m alive, if that’s what you mean,’ croaked Jones as he sat up slowly, noticing all the runes and symbols on the floor had vanished. His throat was dry. He could taste pears and woodsmoke and vinegar all at once.
‘At least the hairy men are gone,’ said Ruby brightly, but her smile bounced right back off Jones.
He stood up, groaning as his head hurt.
When Ruby caught sight of the black leather book lying on the floor beside the door, she realized, with a little flutter in her heart, she could read the title.
The Black Book of Magical Instruction
Quickly, she tottered to her feet. The words on the pages were no longer unreadable either. Flicking through the book, she saw spells and charms for all sorts of things: levitations . . . transformations . . . weather cycles . . .
‘Look! The words, I can read them! Can you?’ She held up the book for Jones, who just nodded curtly and looked away.
‘I don’t want to see any of it,’ he said.
‘So I’ve Commenced, right, got the gift of magic, if I can read what the book says?’ Jones’s head was so sore he couldn’t be bothered to speak. ‘Well?’ asked Ruby.
Jones just shrugged. ‘Yes,’ he said. Before Ruby could ask anything else, they both heard the sound of glass breaking downstairs. A moment later came the shrill, pipsqueak voices of the imps. And then Jones and Ruby looked at each other as they realized the cries downstairs were not happy ones. The imps were screaming.
Jones stopped outside Maitland’s study with Ruby behind him. At the sound of another tiny scream, he nudged open the door.
The pale, bald man sitting behind the desk was cloaked in the red velvet curtain that had been hanging on the rail above the large window in the study. He was holding an imp by its waist and the poor creature shrieked again as the man opened his mouth. He bit off its head with his sharp black teeth and spat it onto the floor. With the imp’s legs still twitching, the man drank from the creature as if it was a bottle.
The headless bodies of all the other imps lay scattered on the carpet like rag dolls, the broken jar in pieces all around them.
When the man noticed Jones standing in the doorway, he smiled.
‘Where’s Maitland, Jones?’ His voice was hoarse and barely audible. He raised a hand to pluck something red and meaty from the corner of his mouth, his long pale fingers shaking.
‘Maitland’s dead.’
The man grinned slowly, as though hearing a punchline to a joke it had taken him a moment to understand. ‘How terribly . . .’ he waved his hand as though searching for the right word, ‘. . . inconvenient for you, Jones, my boy. And for your friend too.’ The man grinned at Ruby. ‘Hello, Ruby Jenkins. How’s the finger?’
Ruby stared at the man’s sharp black teeth. She opened her mouth and then closed it again as something clicked in her head and she searched for the skull on the desk. But it wasn’t there. The man nodded slowly.
‘That’s right, I’m all me again. A few drops of your blood were enough for me to break Maitland’s grubby little binding charm. Thank you, my dear. No one likes being kept as a skull,’ and he bowed his head like a prince before a queen. ‘Once I get my strength back, I’m going to enjoy the rest of the blood in that body of yours, and yours too, Jones. You’re both going to help me become,’ and he smiled, ‘normal again.’
‘You need to leave!’ shouted Ruby, a surge of courage racing through her. ‘Or else.’ She reached for the gun in her hoodie pocket and then realized it wasn’t there, remembering she’d left it on the shelf in the cupboard upstairs. The man stared at Ruby with eyes that were black and yellow.
‘Or . . . else . . . what?’ he said calmly. ‘Ahh,’ he said, eyeing The Black Book of Magical Instruction in Ruby’s other hand, ‘Badlander magic perhaps? I know . . .’ The man swallowed, his throat crackling like a dirty pipe. ‘I know magic too.’ He held out his hand and whispered a few strange-sounding words, conjuring up faint greyish sparks around his fingers, which seemed to please him greatly.
‘Actually,’ said Ruby, rifling through the pages of the book, ‘unluckily for you I’ve just Commenced. So maybe I will try some magic.’
The man laughed. ‘Girls can’t Commence. Badlander magic’s only for men and boys.’
‘Let’s see
about that, shall we?’ Ruby started humming, to try and keep her spirits up, as she skipped through the book. But footnotes and asterisks seemed to pepper every page. The word ‘WARNING!’ was written on a large number of them too. Others seemed to require very long lists of ingredients. The book fell open at a spell that seemed less dangerous and complicated than others:
Healing boils, warts and ulcers
Ruby flicked over the page:
Unblocking a nose
Ruby shut the book with a sharp clap and addressed the man again. ‘Look, you need to leave, or else Jones here is going to make you,’ and she thrust the book into the boy’s hands. ‘Seeing as I’m new at all this,’ she mumbled, ‘maybe you should take this one.’
But Jones gave the book straight back to her. ‘I ain’t using magic,’ he hissed. ‘Never. Anyway, I don’t know what to do.’
The man wrapped in the red curtain rose unsteadily from the chair behind the desk. The sparks he was conjuring from the fingers of one hand were much darker and stronger now. Ruby and Jones edged backwards into the hallway, extremely wary of what might be about to happen.
Muttering a string of words, the man flicked his wrist, sending a stream of jet-black sparks towards the imps. The dead, headless creatures jerked into life and stood up, swaying.
The man laughed. ‘I do believe I’m getting stronger. I can feel magic returning to me and it feels . . . wonderful. I think perhaps I’m ready for you, boy,’ and he snapped his sharp black teeth together. ‘I might even be able to manage the girl as well. The blood in both of you is going to let me do so much more than I can now.’
Another spray of black sparks flew from the man’s fingers and all the imps’ heads took off from the floor and went flying through the air back to their bodies, each one fixing itself the right way round to a pair of shoulders.
Ruby and Jones swallowed in unison as the zombified imps ran towards them. Jones reached forward and slammed the door shut just in time and they heard the rasp of sharp fingernails, and the man laughing.
‘Who is he?’ asked Ruby. ‘What is he?’
‘There’s a big axe in the cellar,’ replied Jones. ‘We’re going to need that as well as the gun if you think you can use it.’ He looked at Ruby, but she was still waiting for an answer to her question. ‘His name’s Victor Brynn and he’s a No-Thing. We don’t have much time. He’s only going to get stronger. And if he does then we’re both dead. This is all your fault. All of it.’ Jones turned on his heels and marched away down the hallway.
The huge axe was leaning against a wall in the cellar. It was even heavier than Jones expected as he dragged it across the stone floor, before hefting the whole thing up onto his shoulder. Once he was balanced, he made for the rickety wooden stairs in his bare feet, wishing he’d remembered to put on his boots despite being still in his pyjamas.
‘Again, start again,’ said Ruby. Jones looked up to the top of the steep stairs where she was standing, whirling her hand round like a propeller as though trying to get her brain up to speed.
‘Victor Brynn was a Badlander once and then he became a No-Thing,’ said Jones.
‘And what’s that again?’
‘A Badlander who’s Commenced, but then they turn so bad they start doing áglæccræft.’ Jones took a deep breath and started lugging himself and the axe up the stairs.
He could see Ruby spinning her hand round faster. ‘Sorry, can’t you explain in English, that’s where you lost me last—’
‘It’s Anglo-Saxon for Dark Magic,’ said Jones curtly. ‘The sort of magic that needs blood to work. You saw what happened after Victor Brynn drained those imps.’
Ruby’s hand stopped. ‘So the more blood he drinks . . . the more áglæ-what’s-it he can do.’
Jones paused and nodded, catching his breath, realizing he was only halfway up the stairs. ‘And he didn’t need very much to break Maitland’s binding charm, apparently.’
‘Well, how was I supposed to know Maitland was keeping something as dangerous as that in his study?’
Jones glared hard at her because they both knew that wasn’t an excuse at all.
‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry,’ said Ruby. ‘So what do we do now?’
Jones took a deep breath and started up the stairs again. ‘We’ll shoot Victor Brynn with a silver bullet and cut off his head. It works most times if you’re in a fix and don’t know what to do. That’s what Maitland taught me anyway.’
When he looked up again, Jones could see Ruby looking aghast at what he’d just told her. And then her face changed to a more questioning look. ‘Most times?’
‘I’m only an apprentice. Do you know how to kill a No-Thing like Victor Brynn?’
‘We could check your Bestiary, the Pocket Book one.’
‘There ain’t no time to study a book while Victor Brynn gets more blood inside him and becomes more powerful.’
Jones reached the top of the stairs and tottered out into the hallway, blowing hard, and put the large axe down.
‘Okay, but I don’t like it,’ said Ruby. ‘What if your way doesn’t work?’
‘Well, I didn’t like you stealing that key,’ said Jones. ‘Or breaking the charm on Victor Brynn or hatching the Scucca hound or letting those imps out of their jar.’
Ruby stood there, biting her tongue, before starting to flick through the pages of the black leather book. ‘What about magic?’ she asked brightly. ‘There must be some sort of spell I can use if I really look for one.’
‘No. Using magic’s harder than you think. You need to learn things properly first or else you can end up doing something you don’t mean. If you want my advice, don’t use the book. Ever.’ He closed the book in Ruby’s hands. ‘We stick to my plan. You’re gonna do the shooting, I’ll do the cutting. Chopping through the neck bone can be difficult and I’m stronger than you. Besides, I can’t use the gun. Do you remember where you left it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Right then, let’s get on with it,’ said Jones, hefting the heavy axe onto his shoulder again.
They appeared in the doorway to Maitland’s study a few minutes later and Ruby felt a minor sense of relief when she saw Victor Brynn wasn’t there.
‘Looks like he’s given up and left,’ she said, pointing to the large sash window at the far end of the study, which was open. We’re safe.’
‘No, we’re not. Things are worse than before,’ said Jones as she followed him into the study, picking a path between the imps scattered on the floor. ‘He’ll be looking for more blood out there,’ and Jones pointed to the garden. Before Ruby could ask exactly what he meant, he was clambering through the window, lugging the axe with him. ‘Quick, give me a hand,’ he grunted as he struggled.
Outside, the blue sky hummed one long note. The dew on the grass was cold and slimy beneath Jones’s bare feet, and, once again, he wished he’d paused to put on a pair of boots as he followed Victor Brynn’s footprints.
Eventually, he stopped beside an archway that opened into a walled garden. Lying on the grass was a rabbit, its neck broken and the body sucked so dry it looked like an old grey sock. Beyond it were more of Victor Brynn’s footprints, leading into the walled garden. Carefully, Jones peered through the archway, the axe resting on the ground beside him.
To his left, some distance away, was the No-Thing, ankle-deep in a flower bed. Victor Brynn’s face was glowing with more colour now. Around him lay the bodies of more rabbits and even a couple of crows. He raised his hands and muttered something, and fired black sparks into the soil. A rabbit burst out of the ground in a spray of dirt, straight into his open hands, and Victor Brynn bit down on the soft furry neck, sucking greedily.
Jones stepped back from the archway, stabbed his finger at the gun in Ruby’s hand, and then pointed into the walled garden, making sure she got the message loud and clear. Ruby crept through the archway and when she saw Victor Brynn with his back to her she raised the revolver. But her hand began to shake as she realized what she was
about to do.
‘You’ll be fine,’ whispered the gun. ‘But I need to be closer to be sure.’ Ruby sneaked forward a few more steps and stopped. ‘Now aim, hold your breath and pull the trigger, and I’ll do the rest.’ Ruby looked along the barrel, aiming at Victor Brynn’s back, and held her breath. But, before she could fire, the No-Thing turned and looked directly at her. Thoughts buzzed in her head like wasps. This was a man? At least . . . Well . . . Sort of. How could she—
‘Do it!’ shouted the revolver. ‘He’s coming.’ The gun was right. Victor Brynn was moving towards them. But, as he raised his hands and conjured up a ball of dense black sparks, more questions kept welling up inside Ruby. She could hardly hear anything above the din her head was making. This wasn’t how she’d imagined being a Badlander at all. She thought she heard the gun shouting at her. Jones’s voice seemed to be there too, and then she realized he was standing right beside her, urging her on. She steeled herself. Closed her eyes. Then pulled the trigger.
When she looked again, the No-Thing was still coming towards her.
‘Again,’ shouted the revolver. ‘And this time keep your eyes open.’ But, before Ruby could gather herself and pull the trigger a second time, Victor Brynn muttered something and the ball of sparks around his fingers hardened into a black sphere, the size of a tennis ball. Drawing back his arm, he flung it at Ruby and Jones.
They ducked easily, but, as the sphere passed overhead, Ruby felt a great coldness that took her breath away. The next thing she knew, she was floating six metres in the air and below her Victor Brynn was storming across the grass.
Jones was floating beside her too, puffing and struggling to hold on to the axe, his eyes bright with terror.
‘Pull the trigger! He’s goi—’ and then he stopped when he saw the gun lying on the grass below. ‘Oh . . . no,’ said Jones through gritted teeth.