Maxie’s Demon

by Michael Scott Rohan

  And yet I’d never seen myself as the type to blow up phones and chop citizens into chutney, even types like Fallon. Steal his motor, yes, any day; but the Conan routine wasn’t in my line. At least, not consciously. Could I have all that kind of rough stuff racing around in my subconscious? Were all those thugs a reflection of the inner me? Was I a sort of closet Ahwaz? It was an obscurely depressing thought.

  The old fellow patted my shoulder in a fatherly sort of way – a bloody patronising father. ‘Small wonder it should have filled you with such terror, my poor young fellow. And yet, do you know, I could even envy you it, even that briefest glimpse of power.’

  ‘It may be, too, that the colouring is not all his,’ added Kelley. ‘We know of our own experience that dangers may hang about any such exploration. It attracts – well, shall we say, opposing forces? It may be that in the unhallowed state of the experiment they gained some entry thereby. It might not be denied them.’

  ‘In which case,’ said Dee severely, ‘the removal of this power from you becomes a matter of greatest urgency. Else you may risk becoming as Dr Johannes of Wittemburg, who took a demon as his servant and so, although meaning well, did ever ill. Surnamed Faust, I remember.’

  ‘Now him I seem to have heard of,’ I said.

  ‘A very sad case,’ agreed Dee. ‘I met him myself briefly, in Cologne, not long before—Very sad. And hideous.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘Then you’ll come?’ demanded Kelley.

  I made a helpless gesture. He thumped the table.

  ‘Look, man! Look upon the world, in your day or ours! Does it delight your eye? You are a man of education, of talent, fallen because fortune turned against you. Would you win back your rightful place? We can alter that, man, and more!’

  Then he sat back, and shrugged as well.

  ‘But that you need not credit, if you’ve no wish to. Suffice it that you can be free of all frights. And you can return to your own time no whit the worse, save for the weight of a rich reward. You need lack nothing the coffers of the Empire of the Romans can provide, and its great lord Rudolph of Habsburg. For it is he who is our patron, he the Holy Emperor of the Romans himself. He commands your presence! We—we do but request. Yet, unless you trust these others, these brigands or whatever, in your shoes I would brook no delay!’

  I sat back, staring. I’d desperately wanted the whole thing to make sense, and now it did, after a fashion. OK, it was a hair-raising sort of sense that ditched every standard of rationality and reason I ever had. But what with bandits busting out of the woodwork and Elizabethan sages strolling in for a quick one, they were hanging a bit loose anyhow.

  I was getting dizzy. I didn’t know what to do, where to go. I wished that man Fisher was here; but then why should I trust him more than these two? After all, he’d steered me right into this in the first place.

  And in a way, too, I trusted Dee. A bit pompous, a bit self-important maybe. OK, he really did want to benefit mankind, that I was sure of; but those who care loudest about man in the mass often sell man next door a touch short. They have trouble narrowing the focus.

  Still, I couldn’t see a likelier solution. I didn’t much fancy being a kind of loose connection in the angelic circuit any longer.

  ‘So how long’d all this take, then?’ I demanded.

  ‘A day of your life,’ shrugged Kelley. ‘No more. One simple rite—’

  ‘Say, rather a day or two, brother Edward!’ said Dee reprovingly. ‘Be not in unseemly haste! We must first cast the nativities, seek out the auguries and make all other preparations, so the rite will be safe this time.’

  ‘Oh, of course, of course,’ said Kelley grudgingly. ‘Though it will be safe enough in any event. And once done, by the same, ah, mystical pathways we may restore you to this very moment. Come, sirrah, our horses are printing the gravel without. Will you not come, for the good of all? Or risk some visitation more terrible yet? Perhaps here, where the powers you face must surely be stronger?’

  I swallowed, suddenly dry, and gulped down the rest of my beer. That decided me. I stood, and shouted for Poppy.

  ‘A moment, moi dear!’ came her voice from the kitchen.

  ‘I’ve got to go, love!’ I called. ‘But remember that message, won’t you?’

  ‘Oi may not be an oliphaunt, moi dear,’ she said, waving me goodbye from the kitchen door. ‘But ’ave no fear regardless!’

  I waved back. Dee and Kelley were already outside, and I heard the soft whinny of horses. Mystic pathways? Well, I was halfway up the mystic garden path anyway, it seemed.

  I turned, and plunged out into the dark.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Slippery Surface

  IT WAS INKY black now, beyond the yellow shimmer of the porch lantern. Moths danced fantastic shadow dances over the gravel. Three horses stood there, nodding impatiently and nuzzling at us as we came out. Nothing mystical about these beasts, anyhow – smaller and shaggier than some, I suppose. I couldn’t help noticing they smelled a bit stronger, too. ‘Will you mount, sir?’ enquired Kelley cheerfully, cupping his hands to my stirrup like a groom. I was already checking the girth and leathers, though, and swinging myself into the saddle.

  ‘Ah,’ Kelley grinned. ‘And there I thought every man of your time would’ve lost the art equestrian to those fiendish fire-carriages. Yourself most of all!’

  I grinned back, finding my seat in the rather lumpy saddle. One thing I’d done a bit of in my teens was riding to hounds, because everyone did – well, everyone in our family. It had never stuck; too exhausting and too cruel. Besides, if you had to kill foxes, I’d sooner shoot them, like pheasants or grouse. Preferably sitting, from behind. In standing corn and out of season, come to that. But I hadn’t lost the knack with horses. Mind you, I did keep wanting to shift the gears.

  The old fellow laboriously kilted up his gown, revealing leather leggings, and hopped surprisingly nimbly up on to the leading horse. It was Kelley, with his stubbier legs, who heaved and puffed himself up, his rapier clanking against his boots. He buttoned up his soft leather jacket, its fancy tooling shining in even the faint light, and jammed a round embroidered cap down on his unruly hair. He twitched its feather upright, winked at me and jerked a thumb at the doctor. ‘Waall, illuztrious measter? Art assur-red? Wilt set uz on ower weay?’

  For a moment he sounded like a cartoon hayseed. Had they been doing their best to talk something like modern English? To reassure me, probably. Fat chance. But it felt more as if something else had slipped, momentarily.

  Dee nodded, and cast about him like a dog sniffing the night air. Then he clicked his tongue and urged his horse out into the blackness. He didn’t hesitate; I did, but Kelley flicked my mount gently forward and fell in behind. Just where I didn’t want him, even if he would have needed a really long cheesewire.

  The darkness closed around us, without even a star, and though the air was cool I felt as if I was suffocating. As far as I could make out we were turning away from the field, anticlockwise around the pub and along behind the stand of poplars. It was pretty unnerving. For one thing, somewhere out there was Willum.

  As my eyes adjusted to the dark I could just about make out cottages along this street. They seemed narrower and more cramped, their listing walls overhanging the path and their unkempt thatch bristling against the faint skyglow. There were no lights in their windows; nothing so much as stirred. We seemed to turn off the main street and along a narrow path which wound among their outbuildings, ramshackle barns and sheds ripe with the musty smell of hay and chickens, the odd whiff of drying apples and an occasional eyewatering presence of pig. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the faint rumble of the junction, and now and again a ramp or flyover would glimmer out of the darkness, veiled in its own hazy yellow glow of lights. They looked unbearably homelike and comforting. And if that doesn’t tell you how desperate I was, nothing will.

  Before very long the farm buildings vanished, and the ragged walls of fenc
e and hedgerow took their places, with the occasional stooping mass of a tree; but never a leaf rustled in the heavy air. I rode nervously. I hadn’t lost my seat over the years, but I hadn’t used the muscles much either, those I’d ever had. And I kept expecting a stumble in the blackness, or a sudden sweeping tree branch. Or maybe just one of those all-purpose soggy thuds from up front.

  It didn’t come, though. I began hearing other things; bubbles, gurgles, and a soft, sinister whispering of water, and beneath it all a dull, earthy pulse, almost a feeling, not a sound. Yet if anything the junction seemed to be getting louder. I peered ahead, but the furthest I could see was Dee – and suddenly he threw up his hand for a halt. He needn’t have. I thought I’d ridden into a brick wall. My horse checked and whinnied, I choked and swayed in the saddle. The piggeries had nothing on this.

  ‘Aye, a rare stink!’ grinned Kelley from behind me, dabbing at his nose with a cloth. ‘A few breaths, though, and ’twill pass.’

  ‘I’ve a better idea,’ I wheezed. ‘Why don’t we? Pass, I mean?’

  ‘Because this, I fear, is our road,’ intoned Dee mildly, lowering himself from the saddle with practised ease. ‘Somewhat of a privation, true. But so strange a passage is not achieved lightly. Per stercoraria in cloaca.’

  ‘What is?’ I demanded, peering into the dark and fumbling with my long-dead Latin. Through – something – into the—something else. What was ahead didn’t look archaic. Painfully modern, in fact, all blocky concrete outlines straight at the edges, but with curved things in the centre, and something moving above them, sweeping by with a trickling hiss. Swinging arms, above circular concrete tanks.

  ‘Wait a bloody minute!’ I squawked. ‘This is your way back? This is a frigging sewage farm!’

  Gdunk gdunk gdunk went the pulse, chugging the brown tides of civilisation through pipes and filters and bacterial beds beneath our feet, leaving nothing but the aroma to curl around the steel-shuttered buildings with their tall ventilator pipes. Even for a place like this it was a bit fierce, ammonia and methane and every little ester that goes with them. The worst of it seemed to be coasting happily down the breeze from straight ahead. Right where Dee was leading his horse.

  There was a door ajar there all right. Nothing but blackness behind it, but you could practically see the open air curling up and turning yellow. The stink sidled out with a confiding leer, like a strip-club tout.

  ‘No – I said wait! You’re not going – you’re not getting me—’

  Nobody was paying me a blind bit of notice. The aeration tanks with their endlessly circling trickle arms looked like stiffened clocks, as if around here time really had bogged down.

  I swung out of the saddle just in time to avoid hitting the lintel, as my beast nosed in after Dee’s. I wrapped the reins around my hand, but I couldn’t pull its head around. The building was a decrepit pile of decaying concrete, held up mostly by habit and sprouting little sprigs of weed from every crack; the door was jammed open, the lock long ago bent and vandalised. The gdunking sound echoed around the rust-streaked roof. There wasn’t any floor; a darkened ramp sloped off into the depths.

  ‘We must make haste!’ said Dee earnestly. ‘Foul airs gather here!’

  ‘Oh really? I hadn’t noticed.’

  He blinked at me. ‘Truly? Yours must be a hardy age.’ He patted my shoulder again. ‘But this goes beyond mere hardihood. To linger is to risk suffocation. Lead your mount, and swiftly.’

  I was about to express my opinion of the whole idea, but Dee was already away, and my horse was following his, as horses do – only with my hand still tangled in its reins. The brute pulled me off my feet, and one went over the edge of the uneven ramp, crumbling bits off the crummy concrete. Behind me Kelley’s mount was crowding in, and in the dark nobody saw my plight. I couldn’t do a damn thing, not even scream – that would have meant drawing a deep breath. So, hopping, wheezing and gibbering, I was shanghaied down into the dark.

  The horseshoes echoed on the concrete, and I prayed they wouldn’t strike a spark on the mouldy stuff; the methane here would go up like a bomb, and we’d come down over half the Home Counties in a shower of—

  Extremely distressing proportions.

  Above all I didn’t want to hear a splash. That was exactly what I heard, from about three feet ahead. I whimpered.

  ‘Be not so hasty, master Maxie!’ Kelley hissed. ‘Here we must mount up! Good brother, there’s need of a spark!’

  ‘Naught easier!’ said Dee’s voice, before I could scream. Please God, not a tinderbox or something—’

  The glow wasn’t like that. Too gradual, too faint, too cool. The first thing I saw by it was Dee, holding his staff, with its silver cap in his other hand; and on the top it had concealed glowed a globe of glass, with something pearly at its heart. The light had the same tinge, and as Dee raised the staff it grew stronger. The ramp ended in a concrete shelf, stained and slimy, and beyond it a greasy brownish tide lapped and bubbled. His horse stood ankle-deep and dejected at its edge, with Dee holding his long legs up in their stirrups to avoid trailing them in the muck.

  ‘Thus it was we traced the sources of power!’ he said affably. ‘A simple device, but driven by magical power. Light flows through All, even when it is light our eyes cannot detect. It is only necessary to attune it to the limits of our sight by such a device. And when it begins to operate, and gives forth even a faint glow, there the borderlands of the magical realms begin. But where, as here, it shines still brighter – why, then we are within the purlieus of the Great Wheel itself!’

  I shivered violently. The old bastard was pretty bright himself. He’d made a Spiral detector. And here we were, not just on the edge but right up to our necks in it. Among other things.

  ‘Now,’ he said decisively, ‘let us be on our road!’

  I let out a light laugh that somehow turned into a hysterical cackle. ‘Into the sewers? This is your frigging strange and mystical path?’

  The old man nodded. ‘Strange as’t may seem, it is.’

  ‘Hey c’mon! There’s not much mystery where these lead – look what’s coming the other way!’

  Dee shook his head chidingly. ‘Only be patient, young sir, and you will see. True, it is an ignoble road, through filth to the light. Yet is not that the human condition, even from birth? Why then should this be so very different?’

  He had me there. With my lifestyle I ought to feel right at home. Most of my adult life I’d spent in the gutter. Now I was right down the drain. Natural, wasn’t it?

  The horses were tossing their manes and snorting. ‘Me too, chum,’ I told mine softly. ‘But you didn’t leave me much choice, either. And the more I get to know about this Spiral place—’

  The sooner I should get shot of it. I mounted up, praying I wouldn’t slip. Dee’s horse was already moving, hooves skidding slightly in whatever awful slush lay under the turbid surface. Another thought struck me. If daft old Dee had stumbled on some way to alter the wavelength of, say, cosmic radiation to that of visible light; if there were ways to muck around with physics like that … It was a blood-chilling idea. That was entropy to hell and gone, just for starters. What else could follow? That bastard Fisher hadn’t told me the half of it. Anything, cubed.

  Including, for all I knew, coming galloping up through the Piccadilly Circus comfort stations.

  We were moving upstream, unlike everything else, along the concrete channel. Here and there, though, older-looking brick archways were opening – in better condition, most of them, though crumbly and fanged with grey nitre. The oldest yet was stoneflagged, its channel deeply eroded, though only a thin yellowish dribble ran into the main. Dee calmly stuck out his hand, and we turned the horses into it. We rode in the channel bed, silently, swaying and cringing to avoid the little stalactites that reached down, or dribbled icy drops down our necks. The air was a little clearer, which wasn’t saying much, and neither did we. The hooves plashed and echoed, as did Kelley’s rasping cough, but there w
as no other sound in the sewer behind.

  Now and again other openings flanked the old sewer, some of them looking even older, and they blew draughts cold or fetid out at us as we passed. Occasionally one would belch and spout a flood of water or a thick stream of sludge. Into one of these, no different from the rest to my eye, Dee directed us, and almost at once across an open space with a vaulted roof into another, flanked by the remains of rusted old railings and no improvement at all. We rode quietly, my horse following Dee’s as he jogged easily onward, sitting very straight and unafraid, never once looking to one side or the other, utterly confident in his road. I became aware of Kelley moving up beside me.

  ‘You’re fallen quiet.’

  ‘Christ, what d’you expect from me? Shafts of wit? Among the wafts of sh—’

  He chuckled. ‘Never fear!’ His teeth glinted dully. ‘He knows where he’s bound, he’ll not lead us awry. Not by a step.’

  I glared at him. ‘Fi—Somebody I spoke to said you had to be a tremendous navigator to get through the Spiral. Instinctive.’

  ‘The Spiral?’ Kelley chortled softly. ‘I’ve heard this realm called the Wheel, like yon inn sign, but who knows? Spiral may be apt, or more so. The Doctor’ll batten to that.’

  There was a sudden scrabbling from behind us, and a faint, distant chittering, high-pitched. Kelley whirled around with his hand to his swordhilt, then subsided with a cheek-puffing sigh of relief.

  ‘What was that, then? Economy-size rats?’

  ‘No.’

  My hair bristled. ‘What d’you mean, no? What was it, then?’

  ‘How should I know? Or want to?’ He leant closer. Down here you’d think his breath would be gilding the lily, but it still registered. ‘Many paths cross here. Most of men; some not. Few of them need concern us, unless we should stray into their midst. Which we shall not.’ He jerked his head at Dee. ‘See how surely he threads his way. He could do’t as well in utter lightlessness, where a common man’d trip at the first step. Times are, I think his very sureness be his strength. Sure, because he’s no idea he could fail.’