Hardboiled Games released a lot of games, technically accomplished ones for the time. There were only two people in the company – this was in the early 80s, before computer games were big business. One of them was into magic. Or rather magick, as they preferred the Crowleyan spelling.
He’d been involved in rituals at Dudley Castle. They used to sneak in at night and fail to invoke demons. Their games involved rituals, spells, and all sorts of fun stuff. In a short press release, quoted in a book about industry in Dudley, one of them mentioned a wizard who had once lived at the castle.
I thought about that gap in the dates in the history books. I’d heard something about a wizard at the castle. It must have been one of those things you learn about at school. At the time you sat looking out of the window or noticing bra straps and getting the erection which would not properly subside for another five years. Somehow, snippets of information stuck with you. It must have been in a forgotten history lesson that I’d heard about this twelfth- or thirteenth-century warlock.
If I’d heard about him at school, Jack would have, too. We’d been friends at school. Perhaps that was where his strange ideas had come from.
The history books didn’t mention anything about wizards. They went into a lot of detail about crop rotation and the Spinning Jenny. I replaced them on the shelves and went to look in the supernatural section.
I didn’t put the books back where I found them. That’s what librarians are for.
I found the supernatural section without too much trouble. Initially, I was thrown off the scent because it wasn’t called the supernatural section. It was called mysticism, and it had subsections – astrology, ufology, shamanism, and hundreds of others.
People would believe anything.
I don’t want to appear dismissive of new age mysticism. That would be unconstructive. But it is all rubbish. There aren’t any shamans in England. You weren’t a Cherokee in a previous existence. You didn’t help to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops. You weren’t on the Titanic. If you had a previous life, you were gullible in that one too. Crystals are pretty stones and aliens are not swapping secrets with the US government.
There was magic in England, but it wasn’t that kind of magic. It was the sort that needed feeding. On the American Plains, perhaps shamans did run with the wolves.
In the English forests, the wolves slinked from between the trees and ate you, your baby and your wife. Between the trees in an English forest, a long time ago, a clearing grew. A castle was built and occupied by a succession of lords.
At some point in the thirteenth century a wizard came along and took up residence. I learned this from a ragged cloth-bound book the size of a coffee table. Nasty pictures lurked inside. It ran through some of the legends of the Dudley area – the mad wife of Oldbury, the beast of Pensnett, and others – and gave several details about the wizard.
It said that he arrived at some point early in the thirteenth century. He travelled with two henchmen.
I’ll quote the article. It’ll save us all time.
II
It went like this:
In the earliest part of the thirteenth century – some accounts claim in the first year – a new arrival came to the town of Dudley. He was a warlock, travelling with two companions. One, formerly a stonemason by trade, acted as his bodyguard. The other is variously described as crippled, or misshapen, or wrongly made. He seems to have been more a familiar than anything else.
The lord of Dudley stepped aside for the warlock. His repute came before him. It was said that he could work wonders, curing ailments and healing broken bones. It was also said that he preferred to cause ailments, and shatter bones. A deal was struck. The lords of Dudley would gain ownership of the town for ever, if the warlock and his strange companions could have the occupancy of the castle for a score of years.
Fear and greed together did their work. The lord moved out; the warlock and his companions moved in. For weeks the townspeople were alarmed by strange lights and frightful noises. What happened next cannot accurately be chronicled. The project of the warlock was one of the oldest – eternal life. There in Dudley, many dark powers could be tapped, for Dudley lies at the point of the map furthest avoided by ley-lines. It is a site of grim power.
It is said that the warlock, or his companions, sacrificed five of the townspeople and buried their bones – or some of their bones, as the accounts vary – here and there about the place. All of this was by way of being a ritual, and at the end of the ritual the strangest thing took place. Eternal life was granted, by whatever dark forces were invoked.
The score of years became a century. The lords of Dudley watched the castle from the town, generation after generation waiting to regain their rightful seat. The townspeople grew more afraid, becoming pale and stooped, given to strange ejaculations and wild humours. A time came when they gathered, taking torches and what weapons they had, and stormed the castle.
They found it empty. The trio of immortals had fled. Where they went is uncertain, although many tales seem to mention them in passing.
What is sure is that five skeletons were found in the castle, each of them missing some digit – a finger here, a toe there.
The castle was reoccupied by the then Lord of Dudley. The occupancy was an uneasy one, and in the eighteenth century, after many generations had suffered unsound nights, the castle’s living quarters were destroyed in a fire.
The cause of the fire is uncertain, but it is not by any means inconceivable that a miserable lord, fretting at night in the cold stone chambers as the strange sounds that originated centuries since rang through the corridors, took a lantern and flung it to the floor, seeking to end the misery once and for all.
III
You can see why I gave magic up as a bad idea. It was all rumours and hearsay. The fire probably started because the Lord of Dudley was smoking in bed. I was interested to hear that the townspeople had stormed the castle. I wondered whether James Whale had been bearing that in mind when he filmed the climax of Frankenstein.
There was a woodcut on the facing page. It showed the wizard at work in his laboratory, or wherever it is that wizards work. His assistants stood on either side of him. One held a tool of some sort, with a long handle. I couldn’t tell what it was. I don’t know why it never occurred to medieval illustrators to learn to draw. All of the people in woodcuts have the same face. These three had the same face. The illustrator hadn’t bothered to depict the malformities of the malformed one. I wondered what they might be. There was a lot more scope in those days. Eight hundred years ago everyone was malformed. To be noted for it, you’d have to be spectacularly malformed. It couldn’t just be ginger hair.
Although the story was clearly rubbish, I had a feeling that Jack must have read it. I’d never seen Jack reading, but I assumed he could do it. Some things matched what he claimed he’d done. There had been five murders. They had buried parts of the victims. It had all been part of a ritual to gain eternal life.
That tied it in with Jack’s dementia. That seemed to be enough matching points. I left the library proud of myself.
Detective work was a doddle, I thought. I’d been researching less than two hours and I’d found the source of Jack’s inspiration. If I went in there for a week I’d probably find the cure for cancer. I thought about changing jobs. I could make it as a private investigator. I could have a filing cabinet with a whisky bottle in it, and a secretary who’d ignore my wisecracks.
I thought better of it. I was already a team leader. Give it another five years and I’d be in line for a promotion, maybe a payrise. I decided to go to work the next day. I needed to head off the rumours.
I did buy a bottle of whisky, though. I thought I had something to celebrate. After all, I’d solved one mystery already.
If I went on at that rate, I’d have all the answers by the weekend.
Chapter Twelve
I
I woke up with a hangover. It wasn’t the sort of hangover
you wanted to wake up with. There were worse things to wake up with – a dead dog, say, or your mother – but this was bad enough. For one thing it was too big. It was bulging out of me in all directions. For another, I couldn’t remember how I’d got it. I’d been celebrating my detective work and then without transition it was morning, and the alarm clock was going off, and I’d got one of Oliver Reed’s leftover hangovers living in my head.
I sat up. I was on the living room floor, dressed. The television was on. The alarm clock wasn’t going off, I realized. The noise was coming from the television. It was a morning programme with a boisterous presenter and a clamorous crew who couldn’t just do their jobs and keep behind the cameras where they belonged. All of them were shouting, all at once. I reached over to turn the television off and my hangover tilted like a ferry with the bow doors open. I was sweating, heavy drops of bad-smelling liquid rising through my pores and running to the tips of my shivering fingers.
What had I been drinking? I knew about the whisky, but there must have been something else involved. Not lager. This wasn’t a lager hangover. Those were gassy, this was poisonous. Something settled in my bowels. I managed to turn the television off. I’m not used to being distressed by household appliances. It’s not dignified. I looked at the clock on top of the television. I was going to be late for work. I went upstairs in about the time it would take any other person to climb the Wrekin. I wanted to go to bed until the alcohol had left my system, but my system wasn’t that forgiving. It wasn’t going to let me sleep through it. If I tried to lie down, my system would simulate funfair rides and I’d be sick at length and volume. I gave the bedroom a look of longing and went to the bathroom instead.
In the mirror my reflection looked like a premonition of my death. The eyes were hiding far back in shadowy hollows. Something like a beard had sprouted overnight. My hands were too shaky to risk shaving. I have an electric shaver that runs off two batteries, and I had two batteries for it. I’d had them for six years, and they’d been flat for five. I looked at my reflection. I opened my mouth and had a look in there. No teeth were missing but the tongue had been carpeted. It was done out in furry red and yellow, like the flock wallpaper they used to have in Indian restaurants. By the feel of it someone had put underlay down first. I watched my reflection sway, then held onto the sink. A wave of nausea lurched from my stomach to the back of my throat. A little clot of something I’d eaten last night popped into my mouth, tasting like it had spent the night in a Sumo wrestler’s jockstrap. I swallowed it. I wasn’t going to spit it out. I was well brought up even if it wasn’t. I washed as much of myself as I could stand to touch, feeling temperature changes going through my body. I drank a lot of cold water from the tap and felt no better. I followed the water with more Nurofen than the instructions recommend. Something in my bowels changed position with a loud, liquid noise. I was in for a bad time, which didn’t seem fair. The hangover made me feel like I was four years old, ready to cry. It wasn’t fair. I dried myself and went to the bedroom. I found a clean shirt and put it on, making it unclean. I felt leprous. My skin felt as though it was about to slough. I half hoped that it would, then I’d have a good reason for not going to work.
There are two sorts of people when it comes to sick leave. One sort never takes any, struggling in to work and getting in on time even if they’ve been mauled by leopards after a mistake at the zoo. The other sort take sick leave once or twice a week and never seem to be ill, perhaps because of all the rest they’re getting while sick people do their jobs. I’m the first sort. I’d rather be the second sort, but my parents used to send me to school with measles or tonsilitis or whatever else I had, and it became a habit.
My parents weren’t the best parents you could have asked for. I found a tie on the wardrobe floor. That was a bonus. It’s not often that my ties make it back to the wardrobe, they usually make a nest under the bed along with yesterday’s socks. I put the tie on and thought I was looking something like sensible. I dressed my lower half and put on my shoes.
The laces were tricky, but I managed to get them tied. Not in a bow, but at least they wouldn’t fall off. Possibly not for weeks.
I found my wallet and some change in the pockets of the trousers I’d spent the night in. I went back to the bathroom and had another look at my reflection. I’d got washed, I’d got dressed, I’d taken medicine, I must surely look better.
I looked like shit, and I was going to be late for work.
I reached the bus stop after the bus. But I was in time to see it pull away from the kerb. I caught the driver’s eye and waved as I ran unsteadily to the stop. He waved back cheerily and drove off, changing gears in that bus-driver way, first to third and then pick one at random and stick with it to the terminus. An old woman watched me miss the bus. She was standing under the shelter with a shopping bag on wheels. It was tartan. Her face looked like someone had screwed it up. Her hair looked like someone had fucked it over. I was going through one of the hot flushing stages of my hangover, brought on by my ten-yard sprint for the bus. She was wearing a coat made of some sort of itchy-looking wiry wool with a pattern of zigzagging lines that your eyes couldn’t focus on. The coat ended far enough above the pavement to reveal that she was wearing Derry boots. She had on a headscarf and a neckscarf.
‘You missed that bus,’ she explained to me. I don’t know why old people have to tell you these things. Perhaps it makes them feel better about going through wartime rationing. I looked down the road for another bus, although there wasn’t one due. I made a mental note to sort out driving lessons.
‘I say, you missed that bus,’ said the old woman. I grunted in a way that was meant to indicate my unwillingness to engage in a conversation.
‘Gone, that one has,’ she added.
Jack had claimed we’d killed an old woman. I was beginning to see what the motive would be.
‘Gone up the road. Be at the next stop by now, I shouldn’t wonder.’
She peered up at me.
‘Won’t be another for half an hour,’ she told me. ‘Used to be every ten minutes down here. Half an hour now. If one comes. I was here last week and there wasn’t one all day. You’ll be late for work.’
She fell silent. I was hoping that she’d fall under the traffic, but silent would do to be going on with. A thought struck her.
‘Even if there is one,’ she said, ‘it’ll be full. You won’t get a seat. They might not let you on at all. They don’t all come down this road now, you know. They changed them.’
I looked at my wrist. My watch wasn’t on it. I remembered taking it off before having my quick hopeless wash, and then I’d got dressed, and then I’d left the watch in the bathroom. I had no way to judge the passing of time. It was like being in one of my Historic Peculiarities lectures.
Learning about Historic Peculiarities involved learning about human beings. If animals had history, they weren’t telling anyone about it. The lectures tended to focus on the more morbid parts of history. We spent a lot of time learning about torture. For a long time, people torturing other people would make use of household things, screwdrivers and pliers, electricity and water. Then the idea of psychological torture came up and interrogators began locking people in cells with no lights and no windows and no clocks, no way to judge how long they’d been there. It sent people insane. Time fell apart for them. Time ran in odd directions, like a three-legged dog.
Waiting for the bus with the old woman and no watch, I went through all of that. As a bonus for fans of the older, more direct, forms of torture I had my hangover. For what seemed like hours I stood pouring sweat into my unclean shirt and releasing farts into my horrible gusset, all the time buffeted by the old woman’s dismal predictions.
‘None of them know how to drive,’ she said. ‘Not been here ten minutes most of them. Give them a bus each, they do. No one gives pensioners anything.’
Someone might give a pensioner a punch in the throat, I thought. There was another long wait. To w
hile away the time I shivered and belched. The next bus was crowded, and I had to stand, wedged up against a young man in a sharp suit. The old woman didn’t get on the bus. She stood at the bus stop, watched it go, and then walked off. She was a bus stop vulture. It was the first time I’d had sympathy for hypothermia.
I was late getting to work, but I told everyone I’d been in a meeting and that seemed to do the trick. I left my team to their spreadsheets and switched on my PC. What had I been drinking? Usually I don’t want to get drunk, I want to have a drink or two then go to bed. The trouble is that there was another plan, and I didn’t know about it until I’d had a couple of drinks. The hidden plan went like this: Drink everything in the house. Then I’d go to bed and wake up with a hangover. But this wasn’t that sort of a hangover. This was the sort that suggested serious drinking. It implied that I’d gone out of my way to get drunk. I must have finished the whisky off. Then what? There had been a bottle of sherry I’d had for years because no one drinks sherry unless it’s out of a bottle in a brown paper bag in a shop doorway. I must have polished that off too. I must have gone through all the drinks in the house.
Now all the drinks in the house were going through me the way Hitler went through Poland.
I’d got drunk with the whisky, and then I’d got the sherry out, and then I couldn’t remember anything until I’d woken up with all my clothes on. I thought about that, watching the figures in my spreadsheet flicker. I had lost chunks of last night. There were holes in my memory, and I was frightened by what might have fallen through them.
Seeing the Wires Page 16
