“Oh, what is this?” Victor put his hands on his hips. “Just ’cos I’m the guy with the fire powers, I have to be told not to set fire to everything?”
“That’s literally what you did the last time we were in a forest,” pointed out Adam.
“Once!” Victor stabbed the air with his index finger. “One time that happened! I’ve been to Liverpool once as well, but you wouldn’t call me ‘Victor, the guy who’s always going to Liverpool all over the place.’ This is . . . you know what? Yes. This is discrimination. It’s not the school that’s the problem, is it. It’s people like you.”
“Hey!” said Adam, smarting from a struck nerve. “No, it isn’t. When did I say, ‘Don’t set fire to everything’? All I said was ‘Watch out, the forest looks dry.’ There’s all kind of reasons I’d say that that haven’t got anything to do with fire.”
“Like what?”
They maintained furious eye contact as Adam thought about it. “You might step on a dry twig and make a noise.”
“A noise louder than you shouting at me?”
“I’m not shouting!” shouted Adam. “You started shouting first!”
They both dropped into alert crouches when a dry twig snapped nearby, proving Adam’s point. A clump of foliage rustled, and a young doe hopped into view, scattering leaves as it landed nimbly on all four of its fragile legs. It regarded the two humans with unoffended curiosity, tilting its head from side to side, the dying sunlight shimmering in its wide, black eyes. Then it rearranged its legs and hopped smartly back through the very same gap in the foliage it had emerged from.
Victor and Adam exchanged a look, then untensed. “Okay. Game called,” said Victor. “Where’s the magic coming from now?”
Adam peered towards the signal he had detected earlier and frowned. “It’s moved. Hang on. It’s closer now.” He followed an invisible object with his gaze and stopped at the bush into which the doe had just leapt. “That deer. That deer was it.”
“You what?” Victor shoved his way through after the creature, trampling down plants remorselessly. Adam followed, tolerantly absorbing the branches that whipped him about the face as they sprang back.
The deer was still in the small clearing just beyond, waiting for them. It gave another curious head tilt but made no effort to flee as Victor slowly stepped closer.
“So it’s magic, is it?” asked Victor suspiciously. “Infused? Doesn’t look infused. It’s not half-melted with teeth coming out of its arse.”
Adam was concentrating with one hand cupping his forehead. “No. It’s weird. It’s not infused, but it’s under the influence of something that is.”
“Ohhh. Puppet master. I hate them.”
The deer sprang back as Victor entered grabbing range, and made two cheerful gambols away before stopping dead once more.
“I think it wants us to follow it,” suggested Adam, as the doe shook its little tail enticingly.
“Look, we’re supposed to be picking up Dabbers,” complained Victor, half addressing the doe. “I didn’t sign up for this Disney-princess bullshit.”
He took a step forward.
The anticipatory silence of the evening forest exploded into chaos. The vegetation to Victor’s right burst apart, bushes flattening and young trees bent aside, to reveal a horde of adorable young deer that must have been lying in wait with unnatural silence. Several of them were being ridden by squirrels, and Adam could see at least one badger at floor level.
Victor was simultaneously head butted in the stomach by three deer at once as the animals surged forward in a burst of dust and dry leaves. He bent double, a crafty badger tripped up his feet, and he landed on the backs of the rampaging mob of harmless woodland creatures. Adam could only boggle as his partner was conveyed into the depths of the forest by the animals, indiscriminately spraying sparks and swear words that did nothing to dissuade them.
Adam broke into a run to give chase and was smacked in the throat by a heavy branch that a couple of weasels had been holding back. He fell into the dirt, coughing his windpipe back into a sensible shape.
By the time he was back on his feet, Victor was nowhere to be seen, or heard. The forest seemed to have folded back into place behind the animals. He switched on his enhanced vision to find the trails of the possessed animals and found himself surrounded by a thick, coiling mass of lines, impossible to separate or follow.
Then he saw the original doe, still on the far side of the clearing. It bobbed its head playfully, like a dog expecting a treat.
“Okay,” said Adam weakly. “Whatever’s controlling you can probably see what you see, right? Could you tell them that they’ve made their point, and I’d like to talk to them directly, now, please?”
The deer continued to stare. The leaves behind it stirred, and two more deer emerged. Between them, they were carrying a battered, petrol-powered chainsaw, each taking one side of the handle in their mouths.
The first deer scampered behind them, took the chainsaw’s starter cord in its mouth as if it were questing for its mother’s nipple, then pulled. The thrum of the chainsaw engine made everything below Adam’s waist simultaneously clench.
49
Blinded by afterimages, Alison darted around the tree until she was confident that the trunk was between her and the source of the light, then screwed up her eyes and hoped. When alarms continued to not sound and shouting guards failed to unleash barking dogs, she carefully peered around the tree trunk.
Alison considered it unlikely that two security lights would be placed right next to each other. They weren’t spotlights. Headlights. A car had pulled up outside the gates. It sat impassively staring into space for a few moments before the gates electronically slid apart.
Alison held her breath, but the car crawled straight past her and up the driveway toward the house. She maneuvered carefully around the tree to keep it between her and the car, but the driver gave no sign of having noticed her.
For a moment, she thought it was Diablerie’s car. Then she saw it didn’t have the open-top roof, and the glossy black sheen was slightly purpler, but it was almost as pretentious. There were pentagrams on the hubcaps, and the fins at the back curved crookedly like witches’ hats.
Alison remembered from her driving lessons—along with every other minuscule detail, naturally—that cars had blind spots, behind them and just to the side. Instinct took over and she jogged out of cover into the new car’s blind spot. She kept pace in a crouching run, her clumsy footfalls masked by the deep, unnecessarily loud purr of the engine.
She slipped behind a convenient hedge as the car reached the wide, circular section of drive directly in front of the mansion. It wasn’t the first arrival. Three cars were waiting, all competing to display the most pointless arcane imagery. The winner was probably the Rolls-Royce with a foot-high gargoyle hood ornament.
Alison considered for the first time the possibility that Diablerie had been lying to her since the beginning and was, in fact, a fully devoted member of the Hand of Merlin or whatever magical society this turned out to be. And now she had been lured here to be . . . what? Sacrificed? It didn’t feel right.
She followed the hedge around the circular driveway until she was closer to the door. It was a forbidding slab of ancient wood surrounded by thorny roses, and the silver door knocker was shaped like a goat’s head. By the time she was in position, a large man in a chauffeur’s uniform had emerged from the driver’s seat of the new car and was opening the rear passenger door.
A tall, portly man emerged, wearing a purple robe that had probably once reached the ground, but at some point his gut had expanded and raised the hem to reveal his chubby ankles. He was completely bald, with a silver beard that reached as far as the symbol on his chest.
The symbol was a stylized drawing of a hand. The very same one the Hand of Merlin had always used, and which had been found at the scene of the first fluidic murder. Alison bit her lip.
The man leaned back into the car, fussed f
or a few moments, and emerged with a wooden staff almost as tall as he was. He also recovered a crystal ball from one of the back seats, which slotted onto the top of the staff with a click.
He made his way toward the front door with the slow gravitas of a flag bearer at the front of a procession as the chauffeur jogged ahead and smartly rattled the upside-down pentacle that hung from the door knocker’s mouth.
The door was opened with an eerie creak by a woman on the very late end of middle age, with long gray hair and a practical tartan shirt tucked into jeans. “Hello, James,” she said, addressing the chauffeur in a posh accent that could have cut diamonds. “The other drivers are in the rear parlor. I’ll be serving more biscuits soon.”
The chauffeur touched the peak of his cap gratefully and slipped past her into the building. The woman turned her attention to the bearded man, and her attitude hardened to the level of ancient granite.
“Greetings, consort of Danvers,” he boomed. Alison felt a jolt of excitement. It was the voice she had once heard coming out of the darkness of the Hand’s chamber back in the Ministry bunker. The voice of the chairman.
“Greetings, yourself, Roger,” said the woman, presumably Mrs. Danvers. She was taller than average and quite slim, but with her arms folded she was blocking the doorway as effectively as a brick wall. “They’re in the cellar. You can use the back entrance.”
Roger the chairman bashed the ground in front of him with the end of his staff as some kind of gesture of acknowledgment. “Then I bid you good evening.”
Mrs. Danvers glanced distastefully at the little mark Roger’s staff had left in the stone step. “Watch your robe on the rosebushes,” she advised, before closing the door in his face.
Alison had what felt like a minor heart attack when Roger turned suddenly in her direction, but managed to drop to a prone position behind the hedgerow just in time. He moved along the outer wall of the house, passing within a few feet of her hedge, so that Alison could have reached out and touched his purple slippers.
He disappeared around the side of the house, and Alison was already creeping to follow. All thoughts of the whereabouts of Diablerie and the other two had vanished from her mind. She detached from the bush and flattened herself against the exterior wall, ducking under each window she passed as she maintained just enough distance to keep Roger in sight without being noticed.
He stopped in front of a set of stone doors connected to the rear of the house, so Alison found another suitable hedgerow to hide in nearby. He raised his staff above his head and solemnly smacked it against the stone three times, sending out echoes that seemed to ripple through the ground beneath Alison’s feet.
The door opened slowly with the sound of grinding stone, revealing a short set of steps leading into a larger chamber, illuminated by firelight. An indistinct figure stood silhouetted in the doorway, blocking any further view of the inside.
“Hail, brother,” boomed Roger the chairman, throwing out his arms as if expecting a hug.
“Um, yes, hello, hail,” said the man at the door. Alison instantly recognized his voice as belonging to Richard Danvers’s father. “Everyone else is already here. I think we can get started . . .”
The two men disappeared into the tunnel, and the stone door began to close behind them. It sealed shut just at the moment that Alison wondered if she should have attempted to follow.
She had only caught a small glimpse of the basement meeting room, but every detail was taken in and neatly stored in her memory. She had seen a section of oak meeting table in a candlelit room and, behind it, a dusty brick wall of a color very reminiscent of the exterior wall of the house, at the top of which had been the merest sliver of a window ledge—and a window ledge meant a window.
Flushed with pride at her own deductive-reasoning skills, she returned to the wall of the house and followed it back around the building. She did some measuring in her head, and found what she believed to be the section of wall shared by the cellar chamber. A large patch of weeds was growing against it with suspicious aplomb.
She lowered herself until she was practically lying full length along the wall and gently parted the plants. Sure enough, they were concealing a flat window at the wall’s base. She cleared a peephole in the dust with the aid of a nearby leaf.
The room beyond was quite long, and several well-stocked wine racks had been pushed against the far wall to make room for four rectangular tables that had been pushed together to form one. There were two antique, high-backed chairs carved with arcane imagery at the heads of the table, which Alison supposed were the only two chairs from the original Hand of Merlin meeting hall that had escaped public auction. There were ten additional chairs of varying size and comfort that must have been borrowed from various sections of the Danvers house.
Distributed across them with sizable gaps in between were a grand total of six men in matching purple robes. Roger the chairman sat at one head, while the other was occupied by a man almost his equal in girth, with a full head of hair and a set of bushy gray eyebrows that perpetually met in a furious crash above his nose.
Danvers Sr. was sitting to Roger’s immediate right, discounting the two vacant chairs in between. He was a thin man with an overlong nose and a perpetual concerned look about his mouth, and he had the stiff posture of one who has had the instruction to sit up straight beaten into them from a very early age. Alison didn’t recognize the other three, but they were all elderly men with gray hair and were sitting in matching clouds of faint embarrassment.
“I don’t think any more will be coming tonight,” said Danvers apologetically. “Shall we get started?”
“Properly or not at all,” snapped the angry-looking man opposite Roger the chairman. Danvers sighed.
“We, the New Hand of Merlin, the secret seat of power,” chanted Roger, “are called again to exchange our ineffable wisdom on the intersection of the world of Men and of the Ancients.” He rang a miniature gong that had been set up in front of him, but he hit it with the edge of the beater rather than the end, and the result was an unsatisfying clonk. “This meeting is called to order.”
“Gathering!” said the angry man. “This gathering is called to order!”
“Sorry,” said Roger, still in his booming voice. “Gathering.”
“I really don’t think it matters that much, Jack,” said Danvers. He gave a nervous, mollifying smile. “This was so much easier when we had Ms. Lawrence, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t even bring her up!” said Jack, the angry-faced man. “I thought we made that a rule?”
“The Hand will speak not the name of the Betrayer,” recited Roger. “She who tore down the walls of secrecy. She who abandoned us to be raddled by the wolves of the ignorant masses. She who surrendered our very universe to the unspeakable whims of the shoggoth race—”
“Yes, yes, I remember,” said Danvers. “I do worry that we’re overstating things.”
Jack looked aghast. “Overstating things?! There are shoggoths in the streets! On the television! I saw one this very morning, eating crisp packets in the park! Where children go!” He made a noise like the roof of his own mouth had become sour to the taste.
“I don’t think they’ve actually eaten any children,” said Danvers weakly.
“You really think the papers would mention it if they did?” said Jack. “With that harpy in the government, pulling all the strings? It’s a conspiracy, mark my words.” He pinned Danvers with a sudden look. “Don’t tell me you’ve been taken in, too, Danvers. I thought you were smarter than your boy.”
“No, of course not. They’re shoggoths. They’re disgusting creatures.” Danvers showed his first sign of actual conviction.
“Good,” said Jack, backing down. “Then perhaps we can discuss the matter of the day.”
“The shoggoth slayer,” clarified Roger.
Alison readjusted her position slightly and attempted to eavesdrop even harder. Some dry, dead weeds crunched beneath her. One of them made a so
und uncannily like that of a shotgun being cocked.
Someone behind her coughed. It was a short but loud cough that had very little to do with a throat needing to be cleared. All of Alison’s limbs simultaneously froze. Slowly, torturously, she looked back over her shoulder.
Two deep, dark shotgun barrels met her gaze. Behind it loomed the silhouette of a heavyset man in a tweed cap.
“Bit late in the day for sunbathing, love,” said Mike Badger.
50
Adam ran through the forest, pain biting into his chubby legs and sweat making every corner of his body itch. The leather coat that had always looked so stylish in his bedroom mirror was now a heavy, awkward question mark hanging off his chances of continued survival.
He could still hear the chainsaw running, but his regular senses weren’t as honed as his magical ones, and the sound seemed to be coming from everywhere, as if the forest itself was growling angrily at his presence. He’d tried to slow down and take a rest three times, and each time the bushes had parted and the two deer had gamboled playfully back into view, swaying the whirring blade between them.
With his breath scraping in and out of him like a lungful of gravel, he stumbled upon a sturdy oak tree that emerged from the thick wilderness like the nose of an old man with an unkempt beard. He grabbed the lower branches and began to climb, manfully overcoming the protests of his muscles as unconscious squeaking noises escaped from his mouth.
When he thought himself high enough, he hugged the nearest branch and looked down. The two deer stopped to peer up at him, their faces jiggling comically from the vibrating chainsaw engine.
With a moment to take stock, Adam imagined Victor’s voice. “So, while being pursued by attackers wielding a very popular piece of lumberjacking equipment,” it went, “you thought the smartest thing to do would be to climb up a tree?”
The two deer took a little run-up and pushed the chainsaw into the tree trunk, but the weight of the machine and the limited strength in their necks meant that they could only hold it with the blade vertical. After creating an entirely useless slot in the center of the tree, the pair backed off, confused, pottering around the clearing as if appealing to the audience at a wrestling match.
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