by Ben Jeapes
“Ow!”
He lay for a moment and let the jarring vibrations in his skull die away. He stared at the cracked, grimy plaster of the ceiling, his chest heaving and his mouth dry from his panting breath …
Cracked, grimy plaster?
Huh?
With a frantic heave he propped himself on his elbows and stared around the room. It wasn’t the room he had just been in. No old guy, no Ted, no Robert.
The chamber was circular, more or less. Glowing lamps – globes of glass that held a sourceless fire – hung from the ceiling. Glimpses of stone walls peeked out from behind floor-to-ceiling hangings that were covered in … in designs – strange geometries that threatened to suck the eyes out of your head if they lingered too long. The patterns extended onto the floor, creeping over the wooden boards like an attack of mould. The only place the patterns weren’t was a workbench laden with books and bottles and scrolls and … and things which he would get around to identifying later once he had worked out where the arsing hell he was.
He was lying with his legs up on a wooden chair that lay on his back. That was what had tripped him. And the legs were wrapped in robes.
He swung his feet away and scrambled to stand up, and the corner of his eye caught sight of the old guy. He yelled and jerked backwards, and so did the man.
He was staring at a mirror – a massive thing, as tall as a man and as wide as his arms outstretched, mounted on a carved wooden stand. The chair, also highly carved, must have been placed in front of it. The old guy was staring back, and on his face was stamped an expression of utter incredulity, exactly like Stephen was feeling.
Stephen moved, the old guy moved. And Stephen just had time to think Christ, that’s me!, when–
“Aagh!”
Pain gripped his guts like a knot winding tight inside him, drawing the ends of his body together. He dropped to his knees, curled up like a woodlouse
“Aaaah!”
A spasm slashed its way through his muscles. A force like an iron pole impaling him straightened him out with a wrench that felt like it could snap his spine. Dimly he felt his lashing foot strike something that went skittering across the floor. It hit the wall, rebounded and ended up in front of his eyes, spinning and slowly coming to a halt.
It was a jewelled flask, glittering, red light lurking in the depths of the rubies that studded its surface. He stared at it through weeping, watering eyes before the next spasm caught him and he screamed and doubled up.
That flask lingered behind his screwed up eyelids. He had seen it before. Where had–
The old man. The old man who had … who had moved into him, somehow. And thrown him out – thrown him into this old, decrepit body. The last thing the old man had done was swallow the contents of that flask before throwing it aside.
The pain was receding, like a wave washing out, slowly and reluctantly. Stephen had a horrible feeling that, also like a wave, it wasn’t going away. It was just withdrawing to marshal its resources and make a fresh assault, stronger and heavier than before.
He stretched out a trembling hand – old, wrinkled, liver spotted skin – and his fingers closed on it. He drew it to his face and cautiously sniffed at the opening. It was … ugh. He couldn’t name it, but he knew it wasn’t a casual drink. It didn’t taste like anything anyone would put in their mouth for food or for fun. There was no buzz to it, no vitality to suggest it would give you strength or pleasure. It was more like … like medicine. Chemical …
“Shit! He’s poisoned me!”
The realisation came at the same time as the next spasm. His body stretched out on a rack of pain. His feet and the back of his head drummed against the floor in a tattoo of agony and violence. Black flowers sprouted in his vision.
It stopped, briefly, and he opened his streaming eyes. He had moved across the floor, somehow. He had ended up beneath the shelves of bottles.
More bottles.
Bottles like the flask. Some studded with jewels, some plain glass, some that looked like leather or metal, different shapes and sizes. The old guy – whoever he was – he knew his chemicals. Could one of those be an antidote?
Who knew?
Who cared? He was dead anyway.
Before the next spasm could strike, Stephen mustered every last shred of strength to haul himself off the floor. He stumbled against the shelving and a whole swathe of glass flagons tumbled to the floor. He ignored them because he didn’t have the strength to bend down and pick them up. He had to lean against the wall as it was.
He began to work his way along the bottles. He ignored any others like the first one, anything red – was that the old guy’s colour coding for poison? And if it was, what was the colour for antidote? Blue? Green? Yellow? He didn’t know and so he pulled out the stoppers or unscrewed the tops and flung them aside and knocked back a swig of whatever was in each one before moving on to the next. He did give each a brusque sniff first, just in case there was something that really tore at his throat and membranes, because even though he had no doubt the poison on its own was killing him, he didn’t want to hasten the process or set back the cure with a mouthful of sulphuric acid or ammonia. But, other than that basic safety precaution, he didn’t care.
He had done the flasks and he moved on to the glass bottles – square, round, triangular, big, small, so what? Liquid, syrup, vile smelling slime – one of these had to cure him or at least just end it quickly. He felt his insides bunching for the next wave of spasms and agony – and there was the nausea, appearing like a long-awaited ally coming over the hills in the distance. Good. Bring it on. His fingers closed on the cork of the latest offering–
And then his insides exploded. One convulsive heave that he was barely aware of and he was on his knees, mouth gaping open and everything, everything that he could swear he had eaten since last Christmas spewed out, splashing, malodorous, a puddle of colours that looked as evil as they smelled, obscuring the intricate markings on the floor.
Another heave, and there was more. Surely his stomach was empty by now? Maybe it was working its way down to his intestines, down to his colon …
Finally, just as he was pretty certain he was about to bring up his own legs, it was over. Stephen felt his guts subside, and they still ached – boy did they ache – but that was all. No more spasms. Whatever had been killing him was out of him.
He toppled slowly over and lay next to the stinking mess, knees drawn up tight against his body.
Funny how quickly he had accepted the impossible thing that had happened to him. He would never have believed someone else’s account of this experience, however sincerely they believed it themselves. He had always felt that way about ghosts, God and anything else so obviously at the mercy of the teller’s own perceptions.
And then it went and happened to him.
But even if this was all a particularly mad and bad hallucination, there seemed to be rules. Maybe the floor he was lying on was just an illusion conjured up by his mind, but it acted as a floor, in that it was hard and uncomfortable and stopped him falling through into the room below. The lake of vom looked and smelled exactly like the totality of his guts probably would if it were lying on the floor next to his head in the world that he knew.
So, even if this was all an illusion, he could act sensibly and rationally within it.
Which made it, in effect, just like the real world.
So the simplest thing was to assume it was the real world.
Bollocks.
With a groan he pushed himself up to his feet, while streaks of pain weaved an intricate net around his shoulders and torso and hips. He didn’t know if that was a result of the muscle wrenching spasms of happy memory, or the age of the body he was in, or both.
The body he was in. Right.
He took a couple of steps towards the mirror, and those stupid robes wrapped around his legs and almost tripped him up. And so he crossed the room holding them daintily up like a camp pantomime dame.
It took coura
ge to move into the mirror’s field of view, but he did it. An old, slightly bent man, long white hair shaved into a V pointing down between his eyes, face lined and withered, dry lips puckered like a cat’s bum, glared sullenly back at him. The man who had come to him and led him to St Ossie’s and thrown him out, to this body and this place.
The man who had walked in his dreams for so long. He wondered how that could be. He had recognised the man the moment he set eyes on him – if ‘set eyes’ was what he had actually done – but he could swear he had never given the old guy a single waking thought.
The only difference was the eyes. On the old guy, they had glinted with intelligence and, right at the end, hate. Stephen’s reflection looked back at him with a brimming pair that could have come straight off a greetings card showing a spaniel puppy.
Anger flamed within him and his reflected eyes narrowed. That was better. He wasn’t just going to accept this. He didn’t belong in this place and he wasn’t going to stay in it. Of course, if the old guy’s plan had worked out then he would be dead by now. That was careless. Should have used a slow fuse and a barrel of gunpowder, or a candle flame on a cord holding back a crossbow bolt, or a quicker acting poison. Should have put all the other bottles out of reach. A giggle forced its way out of Stephen’s throat. Caution: Keep out of reach of children …
It was good to know that the old guy could make mistakes. It could help reduce the time Stephen had to spend in this place.
And just where the bollocking bollocks was this place?
He gazed slowly around with a fresh purpose – an active desire to extract information. Those designs were … weird. And … he looked down at himself, held up his robed arms for inspection. Yup. The patterns he was wearing seemed to be part of it. When he had seen the old guy in isolation, the clothes had been weird enough. Here, in this chamber, wherever it was, there suddenly seemed to be much more of a purpose. He felt like was part of a machine, of the same device as the things on the wall and the floor. Just by moving across the room from one side to the other, he felt he would be like an electron travelling down a path on a silicon chip. He would be achieving something, performing some function.
Though nothing happened when he did move. There was a window, a stone arch at waist-height in one wall. A pair of wooden shutters stood open on either side. Walking over to it took almost as much courage as looking at himself in the mirror, because Stephen suspected that whatever lay outside it wasn’t Salisbury, or anywhere in Wiltshire.
In fact, all he could tell once he had summoned the courage to look was that wherever it was, it didn’t have street lights. It was dark on a cloudy night. He could make out the diffuse glow of the moon, low on the horizon, which backlit a small circle of clouds. But they then faded into blank and apart from the occasional glimmer down below – okay, so he was high up, maybe in some kind of tower, but somehow he had already got that vibe – that could have been a lantern or a fire, he could see nothing.
There was no glass in the window, but no breeze came through it. Stephen frowned in thought. He could almost believe the window just looked into a dark room, apart from the moon and the lights … He extended a wrinkled old hand into the dark. His fingertips met a tingle, which moved on over his hand and up his arm, and he felt a cool night breeze against his skin. He withdrew his hand again and felt the tingle move in the other direction. The night breeze died away.
Just to be sure, he repeated the experiment with the other hand, then with both. Cool, moving air on one side of the tingle; warm, still air on the other.
Okay, so there was a force field. Now that, it had to be admitted in spite of everything, was quite cool. How would you do that? He supposed that if you could get all the randomly moving air molecules to align in–
Concentrate, concentrate!
The old guy. That was who he should be concentrating on. The old guy who had pushed him out of his body and into this, which meant …
Stephen actually gasped out loud. Funny how there was always someone worse off, wasn’t it? Because if the old guy really had done a straight body swap, that meant he was now alone with Ted and Robert. His best friend and a helpless kid, both comatose and helpless.
Right. So he had to do something. Think, think. Stephen paced around the room, feeling those stupid bloody robes wrapping round his legs. The old guy had only travelled – what, mentally? Psychically? Perhaps – even though Stephen hated to use the word – spiritually?
But not materially. So whatever means he had used to communicate with Stephen, and to – um – project himself, and to make the transference …
Stephen slowed down and looked about him with fresh eyes.
Whatever the old guy had used, it was still here.
Yup, he really should have gone with the gunpowder. Totally wreck the place. Burn his bridges.
“Right,” he said out loud. “Where are you?”
His voice sounded strange – air vibrating in a larynx torn raw by the world’s greatest barf fest and shaped by a tongue that was different to the one he had lived with all his life.
The place all just looked too low tech for the kind of the thing that had happened. He strode to the largest table by the wall and ran his hands over the things that were there. Brass instruments – something like a compass, a sextant, other things he couldn’t even guess at. A genuine, honest-to-non-existent-God feather quill pen, with ink pot next to it. Sheets of vellum or parchment or whatever – he wasn’t really up on the distinctions – half covered with symbols he couldn’t decipher or crisscrossed with a spider’s web of lines and scribbles. The books on the shelves were more like collections of loose parchments, bound together between hard boards.
Think, think, think …
He cocked an eye at the ceiling. There was no crocodile hanging from it, but apart from that, he was quite prepared to believe – in the best spirit of Sherlock Holmes – that in the absence of any alternate and more likely hypothesis, the unlikely one presented to him by his senses and impressions was in fact true. Which was that he was in the lair of a mad, evil magician.
And if any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic, as any good geek could tell you, then the opposite was also true. A mad, evil nth-level mage was just the same as a mad, evil scientist with the secrets of telepathy and matter manipulation and multi-dimensional engineering at his fingertips.
A frequent source of frustration for Stephen was that all the best starship bridges, control rooms and whatever on TV were depicted as high-tech realms of flashing lights and display screens. If he had that level of technology at his command, he would settle for nothing less than direct mental input and voice controlled automation of everything.
So how about if he commanded that level of magic instead?
And so he said, or rather ordered:
“Show me Ted.”
He looked around expectantly, and his shoulders slowly slumped. Nothing happened, nothing changed. No hologram of the room at St Ossie’s appeared in the middle of the room. He turned a slow circle, hope draining out of him as he looked around for something, anything that was different.
But then he looked back at himself in the mirror, and he wasn’t there anymore.
Chapter 16
“A long time ago,” said Zoe, “in a place that’s far, far away – and believe me, you will never have heard of it and you never will–”
“Not the place I was just in?”
It felt wrong to butt into the rhythm of a fairy tale, but questions still seethed inside him. Zoe grated her teeth.
“Meta-Salisbury, no. That isn’t anywhere. This was … another place. Look, just listen, right?”
“Right–” Ted resolved to keep the questions buttoned down. Maybe they would all be answered if he just kept quiet.
“There was a powerful class of magicians. They were all solitary types. They had to be, because to be even slightly good at what they did, they had to spend years and years with books and scrolls
and potions, practicing spells and rituals–”
St Ossie’s was a couple of miles out of the city. In the monochrome moonlight the unlit road to Salisbury was surrounded by fields that were smooth plains of grey, sweeping off into infinity. The sky ahead was an orange glow above the city. Sometimes they would go into single file as the occasional car came by. Otherwise, side by side, they walked and she talked.
“I thought you said magic was all about using your will to do stuff,” Ted pointed out, when she came to a natural break.
“It is. Spells and rituals are just formalised ways of imposing your will on your environment. There’s no such thing as a magic word that just anyone can say – no abracadabra, no unforgivable curses. But they kind of lost sight of that. To them it was all about the research, the finding out, the getting better at better at doing it–” She smiled sideways at him. “You could say they were magic geeks.”
Ted grunted.
“And eventually, between them, they knew how to do just about anything. Then they had the great idea of pooling everything that they knew. All their knowledge, all their craft, all their lore, all in one place.”
“Good plan.”
“Worst plan ever. You see, it was too big. Even with all their scrolls, their symbols, their crystals–” Her teeth flashed in a moonlit grin. “ ... Their magic lamps and bottles–”
“Oh, come on!”
“–They couldn’t contain it. All the knowledge, pooled together, was so powerful it was practically a living thing in its own right. Without realising it they had created the Knowledge. Think of it with a big K. And that is what you saw in the cathedral–”
Ted shuddered. He didn’t think of it with a big K. He thought instead of the way it had called to him, and even that simple memory stirred up the desire to possess it again. It bubbled up from deep inside and for a moment it threatened to become all that he wanted, all over again, until he jumped on top of it and pushed it back down with both hands, back into the slime it had come out of.