Differently Morphous

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  Alison was as close to the maisonette window as she could hope to be. The squirrels were already dragging her limbs back like bored children, and it took all of her strength to keep herself in place. “Doctor! Now!”

  An agonizing second later, Diablerie reappeared, holding what looked like a loop of pink measuring tape. “Hold still,” he said bitterly, before throwing the tape like a cowboy unsure of how to lasso properly.

  The circle dropped neatly around Alison and her squirrel entourage, landing in a circle around their feet. She could see now that it almost certainly was measuring tape, held in a circle with the aid of staples, but instead of numbered marks, it was adorned with a repeating series of symbols that didn’t belong to any written language Alison had ever seen. “What’s that?!” she asked.

  “Stage one,” said Diablerie dismissively. He was holding a smartphone toward her at arm’s length. The screen bore an image of an old-fashioned gramophone, with an animated wax cylinder that spun as the phone played a looping audio file.

  It was the voice of a woman, talking in an unceasing bored monotone as if reading from a script. The syllables were completely unfamiliar to Alison, but she instantly knew, with a certainty she couldn’t explain, that they were related to the written symbols on the circle.

  The sounds seemed to drill straight into the core of her subconscious without needing to wait for her ears to register them. Everything outside the circle fell away into an abyss. She and the squirrels had already stopped resisting each other.

  Her head became heavy. She looked down at the circle of tape around her and saw the symbols glow and pulsate as their corresponding sounds were voiced. The tight black pen strokes became narrow gateways to the depths of the multiverse.

  Sluggishly, her mind registered a weight being lifted from her body. One by one, the squirrels were going stiff and peeling away from the crowd. After a sharp impact with the pavement, each one promptly regained its senses and scurried away into the night.

  As the last few furry bodies detached from her clothing, Alison discovered that it had only been the squirrels piled up around her legs keeping her upright. Her head hung lower as if lead weights were attached to her ears, and she gently keeled over.

  As her upper body fell outside the confines of the magic circle and her chin hit the pavement, the strange sensations instantly vanished. Reality reasserted itself in a hurry, rushing back to normalcy as if it had merely been on the far end of a piece of stretched elastic. She lay on her front, stunned, fixing her gaze on a nearby paving slab, unwilling to move until she was absolutely positive which direction was up and which was down.

  She heard a door open, and Diablerie’s ominous figure stalked into her field of view, silhouetted against the orange streetlight. He stepped over her prone form and recovered the magic circle. He tutted as it snagged one of her ankles and shook it until her foot slapped limply back to the ground.

  “Well,” he said, straightening up and taking in the scene. “The Fluidic Killer sends their regards, methinks. We stand compromised. We must find alternative lodgings.” He glanced down. “Bring hither the car, girl. Feel free to shriek my name should thou find thyself harassed by chinchilla or shrew.”

  43

  The “alternative lodgings” eventually decided upon by Diablerie consisted of a small country hotel on the outskirts of town. Alison quietly booked them two adjoining rooms as Diablerie argued loudly with the manager over whether or not the hotel was going to dry-clean his cloak for him.

  She considered booking a single room, to better keep an eye on Diablerie, but she knew precisely how that would have gone down, and from the room next door she could at least hear him coming and going. Besides, she needed time alone to think about what Diablerie had done that afternoon.

  Magic? No kind of magic she’d learned about in her six months absorbing information at the primary school. She had understood magic as a mysterious, chaotic, organic force that occasionally tolerated life forms to work alongside it, like a fast-flowing river that could provide a bear with salmon one day and drown its cubs the next. But Diablerie had done something scrappy and mechanical with it that instinctively felt obscene. Like the river had been diverted through a rusty sewage pipe.

  And he saved our life, sang an insistent little thought at the back of her mind.

  After fifteen minutes trying to find a way to lay her head on the overstuffed pillow without it bending her neck at a right angle, she concluded that she wasn’t in the mood for sleep. She laboriously squeezed herself out of the tightly tucked bed sheets like toothpaste from a tube and sat at the little desk, taking up a pen and a notepad that both bore the hotel’s logo.

  “I left the maisonette at 7:18 p.m. and walked for eleven paces,” she wrote. “I saw the first squirrel when it was 71 cm ahead of my leading foot, 47 cm from the edge of the pavement.”

  When Alison had been ordered by Richard Danvers to write a detailed account of the incident at Dartmoor, she had found the work surprisingly relaxing. She had spent her whole life learning that other people weren’t interested in the fine details she could supply, and her mind was forever swimming with facts that had nowhere to go. There was something cathartic about pinning them into place with pen and ink. It helped her to toss the events around and draw her own conclusions. Before long, she had filled three sheets.

  “Diablerie produced a loop of pink tape approximately 3 cm thick with a diameter of 1.1 m,” she wrote. “Along the tape was a repeating pattern of symbols drawn in black marker with an average size of around 2 cm wide. The symbols were as follows:”

  She drew the first stroke of the first symbol.

  The next thing she knew, her head was lying on the desk, swimming in a dull, throbbing pain that lapped like a gentle tide. She scraped her wits back together and glanced around the room for the unseen attacker, but she was alone, the door still firmly locked.

  The ache was radiating from the center of her head. She looked down at the solitary black mark and felt a spike of pain wash over her frontal lobe.

  She clutched her temples, trying to remember. She had smartly slashed the mark onto the page, and at that moment her senses had been overloaded by some kind of burst behind her eyes. There had been stars, and spots, and a brief noise like thousands of voices screaming at once.

  She inspected the pen, but it seemed none the worse. It was a flimsy plastic Biro with the logo of the hotel and a misspelling of the word accommodation on the side. Experimentally she touched the nib of the pen to the spot where she would begin the second stroke of the magic symbol.

  Instantly, there was a change in the air. An increase of pressure that seemed to be on the cusp of making her ears pop. The universe was holding its breath. She began to draw the stroke. Slowly, this time.

  It didn’t help. Moving the pen along the line was like dragging the head of a rake along a blackboard. The wailing resumed, but now she could hear other sounds laid into the chorus that didn’t sound like they had anything to do with lungs or throats. More like harp strings being tormented with saws, or the groans of great rusting metal machines at the bottom of vast, inescapable shafts.

  She quickly rounded the curve, completing the symbol. The noise rose to an agonizing crescendo, and as she lifted the pen, there was another starburst around the borders of her vision. She held her forehead, waiting for the pain to subside, and a drop of blood fell from her nose and splatted onto the page.

  Alison quickly pushed away from the desk, clutching her face and reaching for the tissue box on the bedside table. She looked back at the lone symbol on the page. The strokes had somehow grown bolder and thicker than the rest of her handwriting. She had the unaccountable sense that it was watching her, waiting expectantly like a job interviewer who had just posed an awkward question.

  There were five more symbols in the sequence, but Alison didn’t even want to think about what might start leaking from her body by the time she had drawn the last. But there was also the matter of th
e voice that had been coming out of Diablerie’s phone. The chant that had somehow activated the written circle. She found her own smartphone and started up the app for recording voice reminders, which she had, of course, never used before.

  She tapped the Record icon, cleared her throat, and began the chant. “Agn . . .”

  An infinity of colored stars emerged from the flaps and tears of reality’s ragged fabric and collided before her eyes. She drifted for a thousand years in the shadow of a vast nebulaic cloud, only for the dust to shift and reveal the curves of a tentacle bigger than galaxies. She fell, crashing into a vast, purple ocean, and was tossed by violent waves until she sensed something massive shifting far beneath her, which she thought at first was a prehistoric fish ten times the size of a blue whale, until it unfurled to reveal a black glare that darkened the entire sea, and she knew that it was an eyelid. Something pulled her under, and she struggled to breathe as she marked a tiny dot amid an abyss crowded with tongues and teeth and fluttering motions that concertinaed away forever like an image between two mirrors . . .

  . . . and then Alison was startled out of the vision by the morning sun appearing through the net curtains. She was still sitting on the side of the bed with her phone close to her mouth, the battery long dead.

  She stood up. Her limbs were stiff and there was an ache in her sitting muscles. She half crouched, half collapsed beside her overnight bag and fumbled for her phone charger.

  She lay perfectly still on her side on the flowery carpet, staring at her phone until there was enough charge to bring it to life. The time was past eight o’clock, but more important, a text message lit up the screen. “In Doncaster,” it said. “Meet up to arrange DD pickup? —Adam”

  Two more text messages were directly underneath. “Sorry your probably asleep. Reply when possible. —A” “Sorry if that sounded gruff. Long drive. Sorry. —A”

  Alison jogged the phone in her hand, thinking. Then she quickly dressed and left the room.

  The hotel was small, but it was hardly peak season, and Alison was pretty sure she and Diablerie had the floor to themselves. Nevertheless, she hesitated outside his door for a few moments to double-check that the grand old house was silent, then knocked gently.

  Immediately she heard a short orchestra of thuds, like an arrangement of wooden objects being hurriedly dismantled. “Come no further!” shouted Diablerie through the door. “The private ways of Diablerie are not for the eyes of mortal man! You may never have restful dreams again!”

  Alison abandoned her initial intention to ask to come in. “Erm. What’s the plan today, Doctor?”

  Diablerie’s voice came from around knee level, accompanied by the sound of something being scraped up from the carpet. “What? Oh. We will depart for the Danvers manor at five. Until then, the day is yours. Cringe now at Diablerie’s uncanny generosity.”

  “Doctor, um . . . have I earned any more questions, lately?”

  “Hmm. Shall we reflect on the previous day? Failure to follow instructions, falling prey to harmless woodland creatures, harboring wrong opinions . . .”

  “Okay. Never mind.” Her hand closed around the phone in her pocket, and she turned away.

  Diablerie sighed with irritation. “Urgh. Ask your question, girl.”

  Alison returned swiftly. “That . . . thing you did yesterday. With the circle of symbols and the chant.” She swallowed. “What was it?”

  Diablerie was silent for a moment. “You attempted to write the runes, didn’t you.”

  The reply caught in Alison’s throat.

  “Ha!” said Diablerie, amused. “Finally, you show some promising curiosity. What you saw, as your gormless jaw went slack at the infinite mysteries of Diablerie, was runecrafting.”

  “What is it?”

  “The means by which even the untainted may play the infernal threads of magic that crisscross our reality like cosmic harp strings.” His voice was full of confidence, and it sounded like he was standing upright again. “The right combination of runes, activated by chanting aloud their associated syllables, can reproduce any ungodly effect that an internal taint can make.”

  Alison’s first thought was that this sounded like something Nita would disapprove of, being a classic case of what she called “identity appropriation.” But the effect that drawing and incanting a rune had had on Alison’s mind was still painfully fresh in her memory, and she shuddered at the thought of trying to appropriate further. “So what you did yesterday . . .”

  “A trifling dispel. Anything infected by the influence of a taint was repelled from within the confines of the circle. A trivial application of Diablerie’s vast knowledge, equivalent to a computer programmer’s first punch card. But check yourself carefully, girl. There is a slim possibility that it could erase your personality, and I am uncertain how I would tell if it had.”

  Alison firmly decided she was going to take that last point as a joke. “When I . . . when I tried to copy the symbol . . .”

  “Indeed,” interjected Diablerie. “The language of the Ancients has an inbuilt defense to dissuade the clumsy hand of the uninitiated. To inscribe the runes, or express the syllables, is to invite raving madness. The tainted ones perform their sinister tricks by calling upon the voice of the one Ancient with whom they have their dark pact. The runecrafter invites the voice of every Ancient at once.”

  Alison noticed that she was sitting on the floor. She was weighed down by the memory of those gibbering voices that had bored through her senses, simultaneously hostile, frightened, and mocking. “But I hadn’t even finished the rune.”

  “It matters not. You knew what the symbol was to be. It matters not the means by which the symbol is inscribed: by pen, by computer, by arranging the godforsaken contents of a befouled litterbox. As long as the intention lies behind it, the Ancients will find you and tear your mind between them. Your sanity will thank you to trifle no further with runecrafting, girl.”

  “But how did you write it in the first place?”

  “You are getting distinctly presumptuous about your question entitlement, girl.” There was a pause. “Surely the answer is obvious even to you. I achieved the feat through the extraordinary resources that are Diablerie’s alone to command.” Another pause. “I made somebody else do it.”

  Alison considered this in silence. Then she took out her phone and began to text. “Meet at Danvers estate after 5,” she tapped out. “Do not approach if DD is carrying tape measure. —AA”

  44

  As Alison and Diablerie drove up the straight road that led to the Danvers estate, the perimeter wall came slowly into view. It was a narrow belt stretching across the dales, constructed from orange brick that veered on pink. To Alison’s eyes, it seemed like it had been built (or rebuilt) relatively recently.

  “I think this is it,” she said, one eye on the glimmering satnav console. Diablerie, taking his usual spot in the back seat, didn’t respond. His eyes were closed, and he was moving his arms like seaweed on an ocean bed.

  Alison could see that, beyond the wall, the grounds rose shallowly into a rounded hill, on top of which was perched the ancestral Danvers house. But for a few glimpses of lighted windows, it was almost entirely hidden from view by a regiment of old, straight trees, which seemed to join up with a much more chaotic and poorly maintained forest on the far side of the hill.

  Richard Danvers had said—with a strangely reluctant pride—that his family had ruled their estate since the days of John Dee’s magic council that served Queen Elizabeth I, but Victor had later informed her that they hadn’t actually been on it at the time. The Danvers family had only gotten involved with the Ministry of Occultism in the late nineteenth century, when Jonathan Danvers had been at his gentlemen’s club in London and had overheard some men discussing the matter of wereterrier attacks. He had joined the Hand of Merlin after a few months of desperately hanging around them asking nagging questions.

  Drawing nearer still, Alison could make out the details o
f the house through the trees. The largest visible structure was a medieval-style stone tower that didn’t look remotely old enough to be genuinely medieval. The rest of the house leaned against it and was built from black stone and old, tough wood. The walls had been deliberately built to taper outwards, so that the house would seem to loom over the observer like a terrifying shadow on a cave wall.

  Sadly, the effect relied heavily on being seen at night. Now, in the early evening, it looked more like a theme-park haunted house that just wasn’t drawing in punters anymore.

  Soon, the main gate was in view. It seemed to be as relatively new as the wall, as it was made from curved brass bars arranged into warm, welcoming patterns, in stark contrast to the house beyond. The various Danvers patriarchs throughout history must have had a broad variety of demeanors.

  She didn’t notice Adam Hesketh’s car until moments before she sped straight past it. It was parked about a hundred yards from the gates, partially concealed by the companionable arms of a nearby willow. She checked on Diablerie with the rearview mirror, but his eyes were still closed. He probably wouldn’t recognize Adam’s car from a single glance, anyway. Probably.

  In any case, parking right next to it didn’t feel like the best course of action. Neither, on reflection, did parking right next to the gate where anyone on the grounds would spot them instantly. She opted for the obvious compromise and parked at the halfway point between the gate and Adam’s car.

  “We’ve arrived,” said Alison, when Diablerie failed to react to the car stopping.

  His eyes flicked open and he gave a little sputter, waking from a nap. “Pluh! Yes! Diablerie knew as much!” He gazed at the house on the distant hill and his eyes narrowed. “Hm. So, still bent on chasing this wild goose, are you, girl? To traipse upon the den of the former Hand of Merlin?”

  “I-I think it is still worth looking into, yes,” said Alison in a small voice.