by Mal Peet
Cautiously, Philip went to peer up the chimney’s black throat. Seeing nothing more than a patch of lesser darkness, he picked up the glass and poured whisky into it, shakily.
10
Later, he discovered that one of the Kwik Mart bags contained a vacuum-packed chunk of industrial Cheddar and a plastic tub of coleslaw. He chewed his way stolidly through the food, even though the salad had been dressed with a gluey and bubbly substance rather like a chain-smoker’s sputum. The same bag also yielded up a jar of instant coffee and a bag of white sugar.
He took his cup across the lane to the gateway and watched the onset of dusk. His heartbeat was a pendulum that swung between unbearable eagerness and intolerable anxiety. To fill in time he returned to the cottage and attacked his beard with kitchen scissors, but when he tried to shave with the blunt razor the pain was too much for him. He washed the soap away and the mirror showed him that the lower part of his face resembled a guinea pig that had narrowly survived a savaging by a Labrador. He took a bath and put on fresh clothes. He drank some more whisky. By eight thirty he was so stressed that he was forced to run on the spot to avoid hyperventilating. This made him dizzy and he had to sit down.
Sitting down was impossible, so he went to the kitchen, filled an empty bottle with water, then carried it and the remains of the Highland Park, plus two glasses, upstairs. He settled these supplies next to his keyboard, drew the curtains closed and lit the lamp. From the malodorous heap of discarded clothes in the bathroom he retrieved the belt and tethered the Amulet tight to his breast. He was not sure if this was any longer necessary – strange that Pocket had said nothing on the subject – but he could leave nothing to chance. He sat down, took a deep breath, opened the file labelled Murdstone 2 and began reading.
Hagwrit, Pocket had called it. What else? Misbegot something-or-other. But it was so bloody good. Rich and bitter as quality chocolate. After twenty pages he put his elbows onto the desk and propped his head in his hands. After thirty seconds in this position he found himself quite literally paralysed by indecision. He could not so much as blink. The grey cubes of his keyboard magnified under his gaze, loomed up towards him. He began to feel a kind of vertigo, a fear that he might topple into the bottomless chasm between Y, U, H and J.
How could he delete all this? It would be an act of literary vandalism, apart from anything else. Maybe he could just sort of round it off somehow, publish it as a novella. Ward off the hunger pains of his impatient and voracious readership, that innumerable host of waiting mouths. Get Gorgon off his back. It would be worth a million. No, more. Much more. It would be criminal to erase it. He couldn’t do it.
And if he didn’t, what? Would Pocket refuse to send the nobble? Probably. Almost certainly. He’d been serious. Deadly serious.
But would he know? Gremes knew nothing about computers, obviously. So if the text were hidden somewhere on the hard drive, innocuously labelled … or, no, copied onto a CD or that stick thing. Sealed and buried in the garden. A bank vault. Then delete it from the computer. Dare he risk it? Oh, God.
Philip knew that he didn’t know what Pocket knew. How he knew things. Was the Greme, in some unimaginable way, watching?
And on top of all that, there was the question that he only now allowed himself to contemplate: what if Pocket’s story was crap?
The first time in the history of the Realm anyone had written a flaky ledger, the smug little bugger had said. There was, therefore, a huge chance that it would be a load of mimsy old toss. Looked at coolly, the likelihood of Wellfair producing a finely wrought work of imaginative fiction was … well, it was like expecting Leon and Edgar to entertain the Gelder’s with a duet from La Traviata. And to gamble on that possibility half a masterpiece would have to be sacrificed. It was so unfair! To impose such a choice on someone who had already suffered so much …
It was cruel. Inhuman.
He pulled his eyes out of the alphabetical canyon and saw that the time was nine forty-five. Christ on a bike, how had that happened? On the verge of panic, he lowered his spiritual bucket into the deep well of himself and it came up slopping fear. A moan, a long bovine sound, came with it.
He tapped Ctrl A and the screen turned nasty, the superb text now sad yellow script on a black graveyard slab. His right index figured hovered, trembling, above the Delete key.
Tap.
Gone.
The Amulet shuddered against his breast.
A howl of pain or rage. It came, Philip assumed, from his own throat.
He closed the file, said Yes to Save Changes, opened a new document.
Nine minutes passed, during which he grieved bitterly. At three minutes to ten he drank a large shot of Scotch, tightened the belt a little and sat straighter in the chair, waiting for the Amulet to awaken.
It didn’t, but at a minute past ten he began to hear something similar to wind stirring fallen leaves. It was not coming from outside. It was in the room. Rhythmic and deeply pleasant. He quickly entered a state of profound but clear-headed relaxation. Now someone was walking through the leaves, feet making a dry slushing noise. The monitor screen faded and wavered, then steadied itself, brighter than before. At the same instant the susurration in the leaves resolved itself into nibscratch and Pocket’s inkage began its slithery unfurling across the bottom of the screen. Of their own volition, Philip’s fingers spread themselves over the keyboard and translated. He flicked his eyes sideways: the visuals were there. Yes!
A huge and sallow moon rising over water. Something moving slowly into shot. A barge with a night-black sail. GarBellon, grim-faced, wrapped in his cloak, at the tiller. By the dim light of the barge’s hooded lamp, Philip could see a mantled figure. Mesmira?
Yes: his fingers danced her name.
She sat at the prow, her head lowered over the figure – Cadrel? Yes, by God! – whose head lay in her lap. Blood seeping through the joints in his armour. His eyes bandaged.
Just before the critical faculties of his brain shut down, Philip was filled with the joyous realization that everything was going to be all right. Pocket had come up with the goods. It was brilliant. It was what everybody wanted. Murdstone 2.
Yes!
Then he entered trance.
Was lost to himself.
Until – there was no way of knowing how much time had passed – there was a brief but terrifying break in transmission. The unravelling inkage paused, then went into reverse, undoing itself and melting away. Philip’s fingers typed a few words backwards before coming to a halt. He stared numbly at the screen, trying to remain enwrapt in his hypnogogic trance.
Then the monitor went dead.
He heard owlhoot. It roused the worm of panic that slumbered in his descending colon. He began to rise out of the depths of his inspired catalepsy like a hooked fish. The hook was in his chest.
The Amulet! It trembled, grew cold as an ice cube against his sternum.
The screen blipped on and off again.
He thought or said, ‘Wait, Pocket, for God’s sake,’ and took his hands off the keys and tightened the belt.
Cold turned hot.
He was filled with black light like a swoon. The screen flashed on again, became a mosaic then a kaleidoscope then cleared. Inkage swarmed up the page again.
His hands flew to the keys.
Part the Second
What?
What?
Who?
Always the man for the questions, Murdstone.
Then he plunged again. Became the dumb conduit. The laid fuse waiting to carry Pocket’s flowering fire to its powder keg. More or less unconscious.
Under his dreaming gaze his fingers swarmed like fish over the reef of his keyboard.
When it came to its end he was a husk, an oyster shucked and sucked from its shell.
After a while he came to and remembered who and what he was.
The screen glimmered at him and he realized he hadn’t saved the text. He hastily clicked the Save As tag. Only then did
he realize that Pocket hadn’t thought to give his nobble a title. Not knowing what he had written, and exhausted, Philip simply couldn’t face the task of thinking of one. Anything would do for now. His eye fell upon a row of ale bottles ranged along the narrow shelf above the narrow bed. Tanglefoot. No. Abbot’s Digit. No. Doom Bar. Hmm … Warlock’s Pale. Yeah. Good enough. He tapped the words into the File Name box, omitting the apostrophe. Saved. With considerable effort he swung the chair until it was facing the bed. It was both a short distance and a hundred miles away. Somehow he got onto it.
He dreamed that he was in an open-plan office of measureless proportions. It was night, and nobody was there. Away in the distance a single desk lamp burned, so he headed towards it. Long before he got there, the lamp went out.
He awoke in the same dream, except that the space was much smaller and the desk lamp was his own. It was still night. Or it was night again. He felt OK, but jittery. He made himself go downstairs in search of food and drink. The light in the kitchen was incredibly harsh. He put the kettle on to boil, and found the remainder of the cheese, grooved by his teeth. He ate it with difficulty, then made instant coffee and carried it back up to the study. He sat in front of the computer and stared for a few moments at the ethereal beauty of the Taj Mahal. He added a slug of whisky to the coffee and wished he’d bought cigarettes. He reopened Warlocks Pale and read for six hours, frequently using the mousewheel to back-scroll the text, trying to fix the shape of Pocket’s narrative in his head. When the words Part the Second – he had a vague memory of being alarmed by them – appeared on the screen he sat back in his chair and inhaled moistly through his nose.
He was deeply moved.
He also needed a break.
He went to the lavatory and emptied his bladder, then went downstairs and dragged open his front door. The cool lambent air hit him like an angel’s cocaine; he felt pneumatic with hope, joy, confidence. It was, apparently, dawn. Perfect dawn.
He let out a little cry of delight and scurried out onto the lane. Despite the rigours of the past how many hours, he felt dew-fresh and new-hatched.
He stood at the iron gate and watched the new day ripen the landscape. Night’s last lingering indigo yielded to peach. He could almost hear the bracken unfurl, the gorse crackle open its spicy yellow blossom. Off to his left, a pony snickered.
Philip smiled ruefully, recalling his doubts. Pocket’s nobble was, so far, excellent. He had not expected the Greme to manage so adroitly the tricky balancing of continuity and suspense. Nor to understand the human need for stories to have meaning. To force shapelessness into shape. Pocket had achieved that, of course, in Dark Entropy; but that was non-fiction. Sort of. Presumably. But to have built this extraordinary edifice … well, who’d have thought the little bugger was that sophisticated?
As in Dark Entropy, Pocket’s eccentric first-person narrative alternated with passages of half-timbered prose from the Ledgers. Which he’d had to invent. He was ideally qualified to do so, of course, having been a Full Clerk. All the same, it was bloody clever. And, unlike the aborted misbegotten text, light and dark were delicately balanced. The passage in which Mesmira gently and gradually bathes Cadrel’s eyes in the colour-gradated waters of Lemspa; Cadrel seeing, after weeks, his reflection in each of Mesmira’s eyes: wonderfully done, without any indulgence in sentimentality.
Then there was all that darkly comical stuff about the whatweretheycalled, Vednodians. Philip was pretty sure that they were Pocket’s own creation. There was no mention in Dark Entropy of Vedno, a remote region of the Realm characterized by uncharted vales and gloomy moors, loomed over by glowering crags. Nor of its community of stoned and hirsute troglodytes whose chief aim in life was to imbibe the hallucinatory waters of Zydor and lose themselves in day-long dreams of heroism and sensuality. Philip, while no fan of comedy, could appreciate the black humour in these episodes. As yet, though, he was unclear as to what part they played in the overall schema, which concerned itself, of course, with the search, the battles of might and will, for the Amulet of Eneydos.
He was beginning to suspect that Keepskite, the singularly disgusting Guardian of the Font of Zydor, might be in unwitting possession of the Amulet. The hints in the text that this was the case were very subtle. So subtle, in fact, that perhaps the only reader able to spot them would be Philip himself. He smiled at the thought. Cunning old Pocket.
These pleasant ruminations were disturbed by a flurry of bleats. A frisky mob of lambs, already abattoir-plump, capered into view, shepherded by their groaning mothers. Emerging from his reverie, Philip was struck by the thought that Pocket, having fulfilled his part of the bargain, might be turning up any moment to demand Render of the Amulet. He might even now be materializing in the fireplace or lavatory. It suddenly seemed terribly important to finish the reading of Warlocks Pale before that happened. So he turned away and hastened back unto his cottage.
11
There was no sign, sound or smell of the Greme. Philip settled himself in front of his screen and plunged eagerly into Part the Second.
The switch of narrator, the change of voice which, during transcription, had briefly startled him out of his enchantment, now astonished him utterly.
Who in God’s name was this omniscient narrator out of nowhere? Why this totally unheralded side-step into the Third Person? What the hell was Pocket up to? His eyes jittered down a page of text. Then he stopped himself, scrolled back up and began again.
Bemused though he was, he had to concede that this new voice was extremely beguiling. Magisterial, yet without the slightest taint of pomposity. Literary but also intimate, conversational. Mellow with dark undertones. Complex yet unstrained, like Henry James cured of costiveness. Avuncular. Strangely familiar. Very, very good.
Better, Philip acknowledged bitterly, than anything he had ever written. Better than anything he would or could ever write. A first-time novelist – and a bloody gnome, into the bargain – had achieved a feat of literary ventriloquism way beyond the reach of his own striving.
The little shit.
He read on. After a slowish start Part the Second of Warlocks Pale swelled into a major set piece. The Battle of the Bay of Quarternity, for which the scene had been set elaborately in Part the First, was in full ding-dong. Cadrel’s untrustworthy allies, the piratical Long Bankers under the command of Mock-Admiral Bocksteen (he of the worm-infested beard), came under mort-fire almost as soon as their triremes came within range of the coast of the Realm. This brimstone barrage was the work of the Quernows. Once a fiercely independent clan, these blood-red alchemical miners were now minions of Morl. Despite the best efforts of these bombardiers, Bocksteen drove his burning ships (which were filled with the howling of smouldering oarsmen) through the cordon of Sea-Swelts onto the shore. The chaotic hand-to-hand fighting amidst surging black smoke, the undisciplined savagery of the Bankers, the blood and innards sloshed onto the pale and thirsty sand were all described with a velvety, ironic restraint.
All excellent, Philip gladly admitted. Minerva will wet herself when she reads this, he reckoned. It hits all the criteria of her purple fucking blueprint and then some.
With the battle in the balance, with Cadrel and Bocksteen back-to-back, their swords dripping gore, Swelts swarming towards them over dunes of their own dead, the action shifted away.
To Mesmira.
He had completely forgotten about her. Where was she, again?
Ah yes, in the moated grange belonging to good old Gyle Tether, into whose safekeeping GarBellon had delivered her. There she was, mooching about in her chamber, looking sexy in white silk, thinking about stuff. Back story. Well enough done. Presumably necessary. Suppose there will be readers who for whatever half-cocked reason read Warlocks Pale before Dark Entropy.
But then she takes up the Verotropic Mirror and looks into it.
And we’re back to the battle again. Nice idea. Seeing it in the Mirror. Mesmira gazing at Cadrel’s smoke-blackened and blood-stained face. Her lo
ve will power his sword. That’s what we think. It’s like a Mel Gibson film, but good.
Morl in the mirror! What’s he doing there? Sort of phasing out of, emerging out of Cadrel, then back again. They look a bit alike. Not noticed that before.
Mesmira recoils from the Mirror, drops it. It shatters on the flagstoned floor, dissolves into a trillion motes of prismatic dust that skirl and disappear through the mullioned window.
Bad luck, that, breaking a mirror. Seven years’ worth. A plot device? Hmmm …
Mesmira stands wide-eyed and aghast, or thrilled, clutching herself. Hands clasped on her bosom. Erotic. Arora doing it. Lovely titsquash. Can see it all.
New chapter. Morl paces within the Observatory atop his Thule. His bitter monologue, his agonized rant to his uncomprehending Praetorian Swelts. How he has been so terribly misunderstood; how the stupid, nostalgic, magic-sozzled inhabitants of the Realm have failed to see the necessity for modernization, modernization, modernization. How he had been hailed as a hero, a deliverer, then been villainized when he put his reforms into action.
Philip was surprised to find himself feeling almost sorry for the evil bastard. Having to admit that much of what he said made sense, all things considered. Clever stuff, Pocket. Subverting the reader’s allegiance. Bloody good.
Ah, now here’s the author himself. That’s a relief. Change of voice is one thing, completely vanishing another thing entirely. Wouldn’t do at all. Enormously popular character. There were websites devoted to him on which Pocket fanatics wittered to each other in Gremespeak. In the nobbles his self-portrait was a somewhat flattering one, of course. If his admirers knew what the real Pocket was like, what he was capable of, they might revise their opinions.
Anyway, here he comes, disguised as a Morven pedlar, the lead-sealed Fourth Device concealed in the false bottom of his cart.
