by Unknown
In the shivering light he started making a circle, copper and silver rods alternating and the wire strung between them. I got the electric motor out and made sure it was working. Ten minutes of power was about all it was good for.
‘So are these things alive?’ Walther asked. ‘That’s the question of two-hundred years of study. Ghosts and genii, are they just an echo, or do they have their own drives and motives? Only in the last few years has an equivalent situation arisen, to give us our metaphor. Those computer programs, the robot ones, that you let loose on the internet and they steal everyone’s credit card numbers. That’s a bit like it. More and more complex behaviour, and you can make them so they learn and react and look after themselves and all sorts, until you say: where do you draw the line? Here is something that is entirely artificial, that follows a complex set of rules, and yet … and yet … isn’t the same thing true of us?’
‘So this thing is making people disappear? And why only recently, if it’s been there so long?’
He had the instrument desk out now. It was just a piece of wood with a thermometer, a barometer, a compass and a few other dials I didn’t know. He grinned up at me.
‘Inside the circle, if I were you. And fire her up.’
The quiet hum of the motor put a current through all the rods and wires. Walther consulted the instruments and then put in a few chalk marks on the boards of the stage as well, shoring up the weak points.
‘The thing is, places acquire a certain character,’ he explained. ‘And I rather think that the character of this place is-’
‘Hungry,’ I said, remember what And Rita had said.
Walther looked surprised, pleasantly so. ‘Very good. Offerings, Michael. They would have made offerings here.’
‘Walther...’
‘I know.’
‘I can hear music.’
It was very faint, distant. It took me a while to realise that it wasn’t just my imagination. I turned to the electric organ. It was silent and dark, and yet I knew without doubt that had it been playing, and had I been, say, two buildings down the pier, I would have heard it just like this. I caught the tune then, and found myself with the words on my lips: ‘Oh I do like to walk along the-’
‘No,’ Walther warned me. ‘Do not make yourself a part of it.’
As he said it I saw something shift, at the very edge of the light.
‘A place, the spirit of a place, can get used to certain observances,’ Walther went on. Offerings. Respect. Chart me the history of Bridling, Michael.’
‘Hell, I don’t know.’
‘Fishing village, then probably some trade as well, then the tourists. Bridling never stopped being an important place, until now.’
‘Important? Fishing villages?’ I was looking all ways now. Whatever I had seen had gone, leaving me only with an impression of something red, but I could hear it moving about. It sounded like it was dragging something behind it, wooden on the wooden floor.
‘Fishermen are superstitious. Fishermen get lost at sea. They live with death and the need to propitiate nature. It was probably enough. The problem is, Bridling Spa is dying and, like a flea on a dead dog, our friend is getting hungry.’
He was still fiddling with his instruments, and I was getting nervous now. ‘Walther-’
‘I think we should be able to get a little manifestation out of him, see what we’re dealing with. I want you to put the current up to the maximum when I give the word. Then we’ll see if I’m right or not.’
I saw the shape again, hunchbacked enough to make Quasimodo blush, keeping at the edge of the light, but getting bolder. ‘Walther it’s already here.’
‘What?’ Walther looked up, unawares for once.
‘Walther, if it’s stealing children, how much more manifested do you want it?’
‘No, but...’
‘It’s here.’
He crouched very still in the centre of the circle. Carefully I reached into the rucksack and took out one of the heavier parts of the heavy kit: a length of lead piping. It bore magic symbols that Walther had scratched into it, but it was the weight that reassured me.
‘The problem with genii loci,’ Walther said carefully, ‘is that they shift with the character of their home. Two thousand years ago this would have been some local god-image, no doubt.’
The thing that was being dragged was a heavy club, as long as I am tall. The music was louder now, all around us. Maybe, back when Walther meant, we’d have heard drumming and chanting, but all the time in between had made its changes.
‘Put the current up, all the way!’ Walther snapped, and I did so without thinking, just as the thing rushed us.
I screamed. I know I did. It hit the ring of metal and wire and there was a flash so bright that I was blind for a second. A moment later I heard the scrabble of metal. Walther was frantically packing the heavy kit. I saw that one of the silver bars was melted half away, the circle broken.
I heard a noise, above Walther’s scuffle. It started low, but got higher and higher as it screeched. It was angry. Perhaps it was hurt, if you can hurt a thing like that. The scream of it went so buzzingly high it made my ears hurt.
‘Go!’ Walther shouted. He had the lantern in one hand, the instrument board under the other arm. I grabbed the pack and hauled it over one shoulder as he dashed for the theatre door.
We nearly made it cleanly but, even as he had his hand to the kicked-in door, I heard the thing rush for me. It screeched words then, a demented, nasal battle-cry, and I spun around with the lead piping in both hands. I saw it swing its club for my head, felt the colossal force of the blow as the piping took it, then Walther and I were out in the open air and running for the pier’s end.
It must have stayed within the theatre. It could have caught us at the fence if it had tried.
After we had made the climb, got over and beyond that official boundary line of the pier, we both collapsed.
‘Too strong,’ Walther gasped, out of breath. ‘I had no idea. I didn’t even need to summon… Two-thousand years of feeding. We’re out of our league, Michael. We need help on this.’
I looked at the lead pipe, bent almost double on itself. Although I did not realise at the time, I had broken three bones in my right hand, in the parry.
*
We went to the local police and the town council. We met behind closed doors. They didn’t believe us, of course. I still wonder, in fact, about some of those councillors. I think they knew, or knew something. Who knows what traditions get passed down, father to son? There were some families in that room that had been local for a very long time. Maybe there was some memory, linking the pier, the thing, with Bridling’s prosperity.
The police were more open. Walther talked them into coming to the pier.
What they found there, beneath the organ in the theatre... There was a lot I didn’t see, but I remember the skulls, all the dozens of skulls, all split in just the same way, that must go back to when there was no beach at Bridling, and they dragged people to die at that tree-stump altar. What they found there shocked and horrified them, men and women who had seen a lot of bad, in their line of work. It convinced them, and it convinced them that it wasn’t something where official channels would be any use.
Neither Walther nor I had any complaints at that. We had both seen the thing itself, the Genius Loci, far too clearly. The way it looked it owed to Bridling’s height of fame, with its motley clothes, its hunch, the hook of its nose and chin, but what it hungered for was the same as it always had been: its due, its sacrifice, by the prescribed sacred methods. Its screeching cry told me just that.
They’ll tell you now that, in the next big storm that Bridling caught, the pier finally gave up, the bulk of it joining its end-section in the sea. I know for certain that it had help because I saw the policeman who pushed the plunger down. I only hope it’s enough. I won’t go back there just in case I might, standing by the twisted stub of pier, hear that high, wailing voice, crying ou
t.
‘That’s the way to do it!’ it said, and I shall never forget.
How to Get Ahead in Avatising
By James Brogden
1
Kerys had made the homunculus herself, but even she had to admit it was an ugly little thing. It was constructed of simple modelling clay mixed with some of her own blood, a lock of her hair pressed into its head, and wrapped around with a scrap of one of her old t-shirts. The avatisation specialists at the Neville Institute had given her all kinds of options; painting, knitting, even Lego, for God’s sake, what was she, a child? She’d gone straight for the clay. Even though she’d never been good at Art, or any subject at school for that matter, the sensation of having something visceral moving beneath her fingers simply felt right.
The final clumsy product sat on her bedside table as one of the Institute’s nurses busied himself attaching electrodes to her scalp and checking the monitoring machines, which lurked discreetly in the corners of her room.
‘Now you know the drill,’ he said. ‘If you can’t drop off, give me a buzz and I’ll be right in with something to help.’ He paused at the door, then returned and patted Kerys’ hand where it clutched the duvet high under her chin. ‘You’ll be fine, don’t worry. They say the third time’s the charm, don’t they?’
She gave a wan smile in return. ‘I really hope so.’
The nurse closed the door softly after himself, leaving Kerys with the monitors’ LEDs for nightlights, the lumpy shadow of her mini-me sitting on the bedside table, and the impatient weight of unslept dreams heavy behind her eyes.
2
The spotlight: that much was familiar to her.
It illuminated the simple blouse and skirt which she was wearing and a circle of bare floor-boards around her shoes – an old, familiar pair of plain black Mary Janes; the ones she’d worn to her first ever audition.
On the heels of that recollection came awareness of the figures sitting in the darkness outside the spotlight.
Five women, dressed variously in everything from classical togas to expensive business suits. They sat in a row of large leather armchairs, cross-legged and impassive. Behind them there was a vague hint of bare brick walls and papered-over windows. Wherever this place was, it felt like an abandoned warehouse. Was she in trouble?
‘Good morning, Kerys,’ said the woman in the middle. She was taller and more regal-looking than the others, with a bright poppy brooch pinned to her jacket and, bizarrely, a loaf of bread on the side-table at her right hand. ‘Whenever you’re ready, please present your pitch.’
Kerys blinked. ‘I’m, uh. I beg your pardon? I don’t understand why I’m here? Who are you people?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said the woman to the left of centre, much younger than the first and possessed of a supermodel beauty which glowed even through the bridal veil she wore. ‘This is completely normal. It will come to you eventually. Just tell us a little about yourself.’
Somebody hmphed at the far end; a dark-haired woman with shadow-winged eyes who was glaring at her without even the pretence of being pleasant.
So this was an audition. Maybe that was why everything looked like the set of Dragon’s Den. Her professional reflexes rallied. She was in a spotlight in front of an audience who were expecting a performance. Never mind that this felt like a weird dream; the lessons drilled into her by her mother through a thousand childhood talent contests demanded that she perform.
‘Okay, well, my professional name is Kerys Willow, and everybody says that I was singing before I could talk. Last month I won the final of Britain’s Top Diva and I’m currently in the process of recording my first album with Tim Byers, who mentored me after the audition rounds…’
As if simply mentioning his name had unlocked her memory, his words from the final briefing came back to her:
Whatever it is you think you see, he’d said, whoever it is you think you are looking at – men, women, creatures – that’s not what they are. They aren’t anything, remember? They’re abstractions. They’re not even Gods – they’re the scaffolding upon which our dreams build the Gods. They are the Archetypes. Whatever they’re fleshed out with comes from your own mind – which in your case means you’ll probably end up getting interviewed by a bunch of bloody Disney princesses.
But they weren’t Disney princesses. They were Goddesses, which only just confirmed how much clever old Tim Byers continued to underestimate her.
Then she looked down and saw the homunculus in her hand and remembered why she was here. Again. Her third and final opportunity. Yet the third time was the charm, wasn’t it?
In cupped hands she offered the little clay figure and recited the words which she had been taught: ‘Most humbly I petition the Maiden in all her forms, that she may smile upon me and bestow upon me her favour, that she may clothe herself in both my living body and my dreaming soul; to speak with my thoughts, to act with my hand, to burn with my heart.’
Kerys had no real idea what any of this meant, but Tim had said to learn them as if they were the lyrics to a foreign song, so she just parrotted the words and hoped that she got them right.
It seemed that she had. The woman in the veil nodded as if this pleased her. ‘And what do you offer, that the Maiden may quicken you?’ she asked.
‘The gift of my song,’ Kerys responded.
‘Then let us hear your song.’
And so she sang.
At first the figures listened attentively while she performed the song which had won her the final, but presently they fell to talking amongst themselves; which she thought was a bit rude. The discussion became more animated and from the looks thrown her way she understood that they were talking about her. Then it started to take on the heat of an argument, and the ‘looks’ were accompanied by fierce gestures at each other, and she knew that they were not just talking, but arguing about her.
This was different. The last two times she had dreamed herself into this room the Archetypes had simply sat and listened. Polite, but uninvolved. Suddenly this didn’t feel very much like an audition. It felt more like an auction, and she was the prize livestock in the pen.
The dream’s perspective shifted in response to her feelings; the geometry of her surroundings twisted; the floodlight was no longer pooled on the floor around her feet but above her head. She was at the bottom of a pit and the figures were standing around the top, arguing with each other over the right to … what? She couldn’t make it out over the sound of her own singing. Why couldn’t she stop singing?
She tried to tell herself to wake up but found that she couldn’t tell herself anything. Control over her own vocal cords had been taken away. She was being forced to sing like a mechanical bird for the pleasure of beings who were not human, no matter what they looked like, and probably never had been. They appraised and haggled over her, and this indignity angered her most of all. The singing was hers. It was all she’d ever had, right from childhood, the only thing she’d ever been really good at, and she’d finally found a way of using it to escape the shitty little estate where her only other options were which feckless idiot she let herself get knocked up by first. It was hers to give, not for others to take.
Use it to escape this, then, if you’re so bloody talented, said a voice nearby. Tim’s voice. Her mentor’s.
So she did. She sang as loudly as she could, so hard that there was no difference between singing and screaming and it ripped her throat like barbed wire and…
3
She was woken by the nurse gently shaking her and calling her name. Kerys felt utterly exhausted; a familiar side effect of the intensity of the lucid dreaming session she’d just put herself through, but familiarity didn’t make it any easier to cope with.
The world slowly sorted out its hard edges from the blurred fuzz of sleep while the nurse busied himself detaching the electrodes. ‘Your readings are all nice and normal,’ he said. ‘Looks like somebody had a busy night.’ He made a note on the clipboard hanging on the
end of her bed, and left the usual little paper cup with its coloured pills on her bedside unit. Right in the empty space where the homunculus had been sitting.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but did you move my little mini-me?’
‘No miss, I didn’t. It’s protocol. Nobody touches a client’s homunculus but the client. We do take procedures very seriously. Perhaps it was accidentally knocked onto the floor?’
But it hadn’t been accidentally knocked to the floor.
Her mental fog evaporated in the blazing sunlight of triumph. The Maiden had accepted her offering! As soon as the nurse had gathered his things and left she scrambled out of bed, eager to tell Tim the good news.
4
Her breakfast strategy session was a very different affair today. Instead of debriefing last night’s dream and picking over the symbolism with the clinic’s avatisation specialists, there was laughter and the popping of champagne corks. Important-looking men and women she didn’t know slapped her on the back or kissed her on the cheek and said how very, very proud they were and how much they looked forward to working with her, and Tim was there in his signature trouser braces recognised by television audiences all over the world, lapping up the congratulations with his perfect teeth in his perfectly tanned face as if he was the one who had done all the hard work. After she’d been paraded around the room a few times, he took her to one side and hugged her.
‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘You are completely brilliant. Don’t mind all this back-slapping. It’s just for show. We knew you’d succeeded hours ago, of course.’
‘Really? How?’
He took out his phone and showed her a graph with lots of squiggly lines and numbers which meant absolutely nothing to her. ‘Your brain trace shows that you entered the archetypal REM phase at eleven twenty-three, and it lasted for seventeen minutes…’
‘That’s all? It felt like longer, believe me.’
