by Clive Barker
Butterfield smiled at the smell of heat from the furnace. From three floors above he heard the woman crying out for help; and then, a few moments later, a shot. She had failed. He had thought she would. But her life was forfeit anyway. There was no loss in sending her into the breach, in the slim chance that she might have coaxed the body from its keepers. It would have saved the inconvenience of a full-scale attack, but no matter. To have Swann's soul was worth any effort. He had defiled the good name of the Prince of Lies. For that he would suffer as no other miscreant magician ever had. Beside Swann's punishment, Faust's would be an inconvenience, and Napoleon's a pleasure- cruise.
As the echoes of the shot died above, he took the black lacquer box from his jacket pocket. The janitor's eyes were turned heavenward. He too had heard the shot.
'It was nothing,' Butterfield told him. 'Stoke the fire.'
Chaplin obeyed. The heat in the cramped basement rapidly grew. The janitor began to sweat; his visitor did not. He stood mere feet from the open furnace door and gazed into the brightness with impassive features. At last, he seemed satisfied.
'Enough,' he said, and opened the lacquer box. Chaplin thought he glimpsed movement in the box, as though it were full to the lid with maggots, but before he had a chance to look more closely both the box and contents were pitched into the flames.
'Close the door,' Butterfield said. Chaplin obeyed. 'You may watch over them awhile, if it pleases you. They need the heat. It makes them mighty.'
He left the janitor to keep his vigil beside the furnace, and went back up to the hallway. He had left the street door open, and a pusher had come in out of the cold to do business with a client. They bartered in the shadows, until the pusher caught sight of the lawyer.
'Don't mind me,' Butterfield said, and started up the stairs. He found the widow Swann on the first landing. She was not quite dead, but he quickly finished the job D'Amour had started.
'We're in trouble,' said Valentin. 'I hear noises downstairs. Is there any other way out of here?'
Harry sat on the floor, leaning against the toppled cabinet, and tried not to think of Dorothea's face as the bullet found her, or of the creature he was now reduced to needing.
'There's a fire escape,' he said, 'it runs down to the back of the building.'
'Show me,' said Valentin, attempting to haul him to his feet.
'Keep your hands off me!'
Valentin withdrew, bruised by the rebuffal. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Maybe I shouldn't hope for your acceptance. But I do.'
Harry said nothing, just got to his feet amongst the litter of reports and photographs. He'd had a dirty life: spying on adulteries for vengeful spouses; dredging gutters for lost children; keeping company with scum because it rose to the top, and the rest just drowned. Could Valentin's soul be much grimier?
'The fire escape's down the hall,' he said.
'We can still get Swann out,' Valentin said. 'Still give him a decent cremation -' The demon's obsession with his master's dignity was chastening, in its way. 'But you have to help me, Harry.'
Til help you,' he said, avoiding sight of the creature. 'Just don't expect love and affection.'
If it were possible to hear a smile, that's what he heard.
They want this over and done with before dawn,' the demon said.
'It can't be far from that now.'
'An hour, maybe,' Valentin replied. 'But it's enough.
Either way, it's enough.'
The sound of the furnace soothed Chaplin; its rumbles and rattlings were as familiar as the complaint of his own intestines. But there was another sound growing behind the door, the like of which he'd never heard
before. His mind made foolish pictures to go with it. Of pigs laughing; of glass and barbed wire being ground between the teeth; of hoofed feet dancing on the door. As the noises grew so did his trepidation, but when he went to the basement door to summon help it was locked; the key had gone. And now, as if matters weren't bad enough, the light went out.
He began to fumble for a prayer -
'Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour -'
But he stopped when a voice addressed him, quite clearly.
'Michelmas,' it said.
It was unmistakably his mother. And there could be no doubt of its source, either. It came from the furnace.
'Michelmas,' she demanded, 'are you going to let me cook in here?'
It wasn't possible, of course, that she was there in the flesh: she'd been dead thirteen long years. But some phantom, perhaps? He believed in phantoms. Indeed he'd seen them on occasion, coming and going from the cinemas on 42nd Street, arm in arm.
'Open up, Michelmas,' his mother told him, in that special voice she used when she had some treat for him. Like a good child, he approached the door. He had never felt such heat off the furnace as he felt now; he could smell the hairs on his arms wither.
'Open the door,' Mother said again. There was no denying her. Despite the searing air, he reached to comply.
'That fucking janitor,' said Harry, giving the sealed fire escape door a vengeful kick. 'This door's supposed to be left unlocked at all times.' He pulled at the chains that were wrapped around the handles. 'We'll have to take the stairs.'
There was a noise from back down the corridor; a roar in the heating system which made the antiquated radiators rattle. At that moment, down in the basement, Michelmas Chaplin was obeying his mother, and opening the furnace door. A scream climbed from below as his face was blasted off. Then, the sound of the basement door being smashed open.
Harry looked at Valentin, his repugnance moment- arily forgotten.
'We shan't be taking the stairs,' the demon said.
Bellowings and chatterings and screechings were already on the rise. Whatever had found birth in the basement, it was precocious.
'We have to find something to break down the door, Valentin said, 'anything.'
Harry tried to think his way through the adjacent offices, his mind's eye peeled for some tool that would make an impression on either the fire door or the substantial chains which kept it closed. But there was nothing useful: only typewriters and filing cabinets.
'Think, man,' said Valentin.
He ransacked his memory. Some heavy-duty instrument was required. A crowbar; a hammer. An axe! There was an agent called Shapiro on the floor below, who exclusively represented porno performers, one of whom had attempted to blow his balls off the month before. She'd failed, but he'd boasted one day on the stairs that he had now purchased the biggest axe he could find, and would happily take the head off any client who attempted an attack upon his person.
The commotion from below was simmering down. The hush was, in its way, more distressing than the din that had preceded it.
'We haven't got much time,' the demon said.
Harry left him at the chained door. 'Can you get Swann?' he said as he ran.
Til do my best.'
By the time Harry reached the top of the stairs the last chatterings were dying away; as he began down the flight they ceased altogether. There was no way now to judge how close the enemy were. On the next floor? Round the next corner? He tried not to think of them, but his feverish imagination populated every dirty shadow.
He reached the bottom of the flight without incident, however, and slunk along the darkened second-floor corridor to Shapiro's office. Halfway to his destination, he heard a low hiss behind him. He looked over his shoulder, his body itching to run. One of the radiators, heated beyond its limits, had sprung a leak. Steam was escaping from its pipes, and hissing as it went. He let his heart climb down out of his mouth, and then hurried on to the door of Shapiro's office, praying that the man hadn't simply been shooting the breeze with his talk of axes. If so, they were done for. The office was locked, of course, but he elbowed the frosted glass out, and reached through to let himself in, fumbling for the light switch. The walls were plastered with photographs of sex-goddesses. They scarcely claimed Harry's attentio
n; his panic fed upon itself with every heartbeat he spent here. Clumsily he scoured the office, turning furniture over in his impatience. But there was no sign of Shapiro's axe.
Now, another noise from below. It crept up the staircase and along the corridor in search of him - an unearthly cacophony like the one he'd heard on 83rd Street. It set his teeth on edge; the nerve of his rotting molar began to throb afresh. What did the music signal? Their advance?
In desperation he crossed to Shapiro's desk to see if the man had any other item that might be pressed into service, and there tucked out of sight between desk and wall, he found the axe. He pulled it from hiding. As Shapiro had boasted, it was hefty, its weight the first reassurance Harry had felt in too long. He returned to the corridor. The steam from the fractured pipe had thickened. Through its veils it was apparent that the concert had taken on new fervour. The doleful wailing rose and fell, punctuated by some flaccid percussion.
He braved the cloud of steam and hurried to the stairs. As he put his foot on the bottom step the music seemed to catch him by the back of the neck, and whisper: 'Listen' in his ear. He had no desire to listen; the music was vile. But somehow - while he was distracted by finding the axe - it had wormed its way into his skull. It drained his limbs of strength. In moments the axe began to seem an impossible burden.
'Come on down,' the music coaxed him, 'come on down and join the band.'
Though he tried to form the simple word 'No', the music was gaining influence upon him with every note played. He began to hear melodies in the caterwauling; long circuitous themes that made his blood sluggish and his thoughts idiot. He knew there was no pleasure to be had at the music's source - that it tempted him only to pain and desolation - yet he could not shake its delirium off. His feet began to move to the call of the pipers. He forgot Valentin, Swann and all ambition for escape, and instead began to descend the stairs. The melody became more intricate. He could hear voices now, singing some charmless accompaniment in a language he didn't comprehend. From somewhere above, he heard his name called, but he ignored the summons. The music clutched him close, and now - as he descended the next flight of stairs - the musicians came into view.
They were brighter than he had anticipated, and more various. More baroque in their configurations (the manes, the multiple heads); more particular in their decoration (the suit of flayed faces; the rouged anus); and, his drugged eyes now stung to see, more atrocious in their choice of instruments. Such instruments! Byron was there, his bones sucked clean and drilled with stops, his bladder and lungs teased through slashes in his body as reservoirs for the piper's breath. He was draped, inverted, across the musician's lap, and even now was played upon - the sacs ballooning, the tongueless head giving out a wheezing note. Dorothea was slumped beside him, no less transformed, the strings of her gut made taut between her splinted legs like an obscene lyre; her breasts drummed upon. There were other instruments too, men who had come off the street and fallen prey to the band. Even Chaplin was there, much of his flesh burned away, his rib-cage played upon indifferently well.
'I didn't take you for a music lover,' Butterfield said, drawing upon a cigarette, and smiling in welcome. 'Put down your axe and join us.'
The word axe reminded Harry of the weight in his hands, though he couldn't find his way through the bars of music to remember what it signified.
'Don't be afraid,' Butterfield said, 'you're an innocent in this. We hold no grudge against you.'
'Dorothea ...' he said.
'She was an innocent too,' said the lawyer, 'until we showed her some sights.'
Harry looked at the woman's body; at the terrible changes that they had wrought upon her. Seeing them, a tremor began in him, and something came between him and the music; the imminence of tears blotted it out.
'Put down the axe,' Butterfield told him.
But the sound of the concert could not compete with the grief that was mounting in him. Butterfield seemed to see the change in his eyes; the disgust and anger growing there. He dropped his half-smoked cigarette and signalled for the music-making to stop.
'Must it be death, then?' Butterfield said, but the enquiry was scarcely voiced before Harry started down the last few stairs towards him. He raised the axe and swung it at the lawyer but the blow was misplaced. The blade ploughed the plaster of the wall, missing its target by a foot.
At this eruption of violence the musicians threw down their instruments and began across the lobby, trailing their coats and tails in blood and grease. Harry caught their advance from the corner of his eye. Behind the horde, still rooted in the shadows, was another form, larger than the largest of the mustered demons, from which there now came a thump that might have been that of a vast jack-hammer. He tried to make sense of sound or sight, but could do neither. There was no time for curiosity; the demons were almost upon him.
Butterfield glanced round to encourage their advance, and Harry - catching the moment - swung the axe a second time. The blow caught Butterfield's shoulder; the arm was instantly severed. The lawyer shrieked; blood sprayed the wall. There was no time for a third blow, however. The demons were reaching for him, smiles lethal.
He turned on the stairs, and began up them, taking the steps two, three and four at a time. Butterfield was still shrieking below; from the flight above he heard Valentin calling his name. He had neither time nor breath to answer.
They were on his heels, their ascent a din of grunts and shouts and beating wings. And behind it all, the jackhammer thumped its way to the bottom of the flight, its noise more intimidating by far than the chatterings of the berserkers at his back. It was in his belly, that thump; in his bowels. Like death's heartbeat, steady and irrevocable.
On the second landing he heard a whirring sound behind him, and half turned to see a human-headed moth the size of a vulture climbing the air towards him. He met it with the axe blade, and hacked it down. There was a cry of excitement from below as the body flapped down the stairs, its wings working like paddles. Harry sped up the remaining flight to where Valentin was standing, listening. It wasn't the chatter he was attending to, nor the cries of the lawyer; it was the jack-hammer.
'They brought the Raparee,' he said.
'I wounded Butterfield -'
'I heard. But that won't stop them.'
'We can still try the door.'
'I think we're too late, my friend.'
Wo!' said Harry, pushing past Valentin. The demon had given up trying to drag Swann's body to the door, and had laid the magician out in the middle of the corridor, his hands crossed on his chest. In some last mysterious act of reverence he had set folded paper bowls at Swann's head and feet, and laid a tiny origami flower at his lips. Harry lingered only long enough to re-acquaint himself with the sweetness of Swann's expression, and then ran to the door and proceeded to hack at the chains. It would be a long job. The assault did more damage to the axe than to the steel links. He didn't dare give up, however. This was their only escape route now, other than flinging themselves to their deaths from one of the windows. That he would do, he decided, if the worst came to the worst. Jump and die, rather than be their plaything.
His arms soon became numb with the repeated blows. It was a lost cause; the chain was unimpaired. His despair was further fuelled by a cry from Valentin - a high, weeping call that he could not leave unanswered. He left the fire door and returned past the body of Swann to the head of the stairs.
The demons had Valentin. They swarmed on him like wasps on a sugar stick, tearing him apart. For the briefest of moments he struggled free of their rage, and Harry saw the mask of humanity in rags and the truth glistening bloodily beneath. He was as vile as those besetting him, but Harry went to his aid anyway, as much to wound the demons as to save their prey.
The wielded axe did damage this way and that, sending Valentin's tormentors reeling back down the stairs, limbs lopped, faces opened. They did not all bleed. One sliced belly spilled eggs in thousands, one wounded head gave birth to tiny eels,
which fled to the ceiling and hung there by their lips. In the melЈe he lost sight of Valentin. Forgot about him, indeed, until he heard the jack-hammer again, and remembered the broken look on Valentin's face when he'd named the thing. He'd called it the Raparee, or something like.
And now, as his memory shaped the word, it came into sight. It shared no trait with its fellows; it had neither wings nor mane nor vanity. It seemed scarcely even to be flesh, but forged, an engine that needed only malice to keep its wheels turning.
At its appearance, the rest retreated, leaving Harry at the top of the stairs in a litter of spawn. Its progress was slow, its half dozen limbs moving in oiled and elaborate configurations to pierce the walls of the staircase and so haul itself up. It brought to mind a man on crutches, throwing the sticks ahead of him and levering his weight after, but there was nothing invalid in the thunder of its body; no pain in the white eye that burned in his sickle-head.
Harry thought he had known despair, but he had not. Only now did he taste its ash in his throat. There was only the window left for him. That, and the welcoming ground. He backed away from the top of the stairs, forsaking the axe.
Valentin was in the corridor. He was not dead, as Harry had presumed, but kneeling beside the corpse of Swann, his own body drooling from a hundred wounds. Now he bent close to the magician. Offering his apologies to his dead master, no doubt. But no. There was more to it than that. He had the cigarette lighter in his hand, and was lighting a taper. Then, murmuring some prayer to himself as he went, he lowered the taper to the mouth of the magician. The origami flower caught and flared up. Its flame was oddly bright, and spread with supernatural efficiency across Swann's face and down his body. Valentin hauled himself to his feet, the firelight burnishing his scales. He found enough strength to incline his head to the body as its cremation began, and then his wounds overcame him. He fell backwards, and lay still. Harry watched as the flames mounted. Clearly the body had been sprinkled with gasoline or something similar, for the fire raged up in moments, gold and green.
