Maxie’s Demon

by Michael Scott Rohan

  By the time he touched base among the brassicas I was out of my own stirrups and sliding down among the crowd scurrying to see what all the fuss was about. Behind me I heard old Dee bleating something about Brother come back. I was a bit sorry for him, too, but no way would I risk it. Plan A hadn’t come through in time, and now the searchers had turned up. I had to make a break for it, Dee or no Dee.

  And if I ever did get back to my own time I was bloody well going to find somewhere the Spiral couldn’t reach and never, never set foot out of it ever again.

  Leaving places unobtrusively and at high speed – one of my specialities. Kelley might have trampled the crowd, but I knew Dee wouldn’t be able to ride fast through the crush. All I had to do was keep my head down and push my way against the flow, towards the shadow of the castle wall. I wasn’t as well hidden as I would have been in a modern crowd, but there were enough taller folk to overshadow me. Away in the background I could hear Kelley’s voice swearing blue murder, and somebody equally indignant letting fly in German – the stallkeeper, I guessed. A soggy thud suggested a cabbage connecting with somebody’s cranium. A roar from the crowd confirmed it.

  I looked back, and swore a bit myself. Dee was making better progress than I’d expected. The proles were obviously well conditioned to get out of a gentleman’s way, probably by the judicious application of hoofprints and whips.

  I scuttled crabwise along the wall, looking for a doorway or something to duck into. What I found was a heavy postern gate, part of the castle, evidently, and not likely to be unlocked. All I could do was pull my cloak around me and hunker down into the shadows, hoping not to be noticed.

  The door creaked open behind me. A white hand caught me by the shoulder and tugged me urgently in. The door thudded softly shut, and I found myself looking into a pair of blazing dark eyes. ‘They are looking for you?’ the woman demanded, in awkward German.

  ‘Er – yes. Thanks for—’

  ‘You would have led them to me. There are not so many places to hide here.’ Not the woman, the girl. Maybe just a teenager, assuming they’d invented such things then. Not at all bad-looking, if you like the dark, strong-featured type, and a bit taller than me. Her face was pale, but even in the gloom she seemed to crackle with vitality. As my eyes adjusted I realised she wasn’t overdressed, either – just a short shift of some kind, a nightdress maybe. This sort of thing never happened back home.

  ‘Finished staring?’ she snapped. ‘A truly grateful gentleman would lend me his cloak!’

  ‘Er—’ Automatically I twitched it off and wrapped it around her. She swirled it experimentally, with a satisfied twist of her wide mouth. ‘And what do they call you?’

  She considered a moment. ‘All right! Elina.’

  That wasn’t a Czech name; it sounded more … ‘Greek! You’re … whatsisname, the alchemist! His daughter!’

  She sighed. ‘Pater hemon, yes, tell the world. Elina, daughter of Hieronymos Makropoulos, Iatros. Orphan, rather.’

  ‘Oh Christ. You mean Rudolph—’

  ‘No. My father tried that muck on himself this time. Only he changed the formula. He shouldn’t have. I’m still here.’ She sighed, and shrugged. ‘Rudolf decided to keep me around, to see whether I show any signs of immortality. I didn’t like his ideas for keeping me busy meantime, the evil old Scheisskerl. So I climbed across a couple of roofs, wriggled through a grille and here I am, waiting for twilight. How do you know all this, anyhow?’

  ‘I think Rudolph may be warming up your father’s spot for me. And there’s this bastard Kelley trying to set me up.’

  She gave that lopsided smile again. ‘Oh, him! You’re another wizard, then.’

  ‘Wise enough to wish I’d never come here! I’m headed back to my own … country.’

  ‘I also.’ She cocked her head at me, considering. ‘Too bad we can’t go together, but you’d be a handicap. You can’t pay your way as I can.’ She glared at my expression. ‘I meant by singing. I’m a very good singer. Thanks for the cloak!’

  And as slick as that she whisked herself out the door and was gone. I sprang after her, but stopped. The cloak wouldn’t give me that much advantage after dark. Anyway, I wouldn’t have just whipped it back off her – and you can bet the little bitch was counting on that. Well, probably I wouldn’t. Besides, she was bigger than me.

  I eased open the door and peered out. The cold streets bustled much as before. The row had died down, and of Dee and Kelley there was no sign. I belted my coat tight to look as much as possible like the usual tunic, and stepped back out on to the cobbles. Nobody gave me a second glance, except maybe because I wasn’t wearing a hat; I solved that by swiping a greasy leather cap from behind a stall. Probably its owner would go off and pinch someone else’s, and so on, spreading thefts out across the city like ripples in a pond.

  A bad deed goes round the world, and generally ends up socking me in the back of the neck. One more reason I’m not in the insurance business, where the respectable crooks go.

  I knew I had to cross town and that damn bridge before it got really dark, and time for curfew. I didn’t need any incentive to keep moving. The wind dug into my ribs like a blunt knife, the slimy cobbles froze my feet, and I shook with terror every time somebody came up behind me. Are you or have you ever been a practising paranoid? Why not turn pro – in one easy lesson.

  It wasn’t that difficult, though. A lot of people had the same idea. The rush-hour isn’t a modern invention. I was swept along in a torrent of lower-class types, hurrying back to their hovels, God knows why. A lot of them were streetsellers who’d evidently lingered in search of one last sale, and I managed to pick up a few quick snacks from passing baskets, black bread, sausage-ends and so on – well, it would only have gone bad. Or rather worse, so it served them right. Besides, I nearly bust a tooth on the bread.

  From the bridge on it was plain sailing. I took the odd wrong turn, but I had the river to orient myself by, and when I got nearer my destination, the smell as well, which was pretty outstanding even by sixteenth-century standards. No wonder nobody lived here. Yet after my first little excursion I’d greeted it as clean air. That said something about what was down there; and it was waiting for me again. For some unknown reason I hesitated a moment.

  Almost one too many. A horse whinnied, and so did old Dee, clambering across the rubble and waving. Of course he hadn’t bothered to follow; he’d just gone to the only place I could be going. And so, of course, would Kelley. I swore, and bolted, down into the cracked floor of the cistern, down towards the drain and the dark.

  It only occurred to me a moment later, as I slipped and scrambled down the rubble-filled slope, landing heavily on my backside, that Kelley might be in here already. A moment after that, as water splashed around my ankles – at least I hoped it was water – it dawned on me that I didn’t have Dee’s staff to light the place, either. Nor was there any of that nice convenient luminous lichen they always find in books. Not even any phosphorescent fish-heads, which you might reasonably expect. They probably couldn’t stand the competition.

  It was blackness complete and absolute. I blundered valiantly for about thirty feet, hit a wall quite hard, and narrowly avoided sitting down in the awfulness below. Somewhere not too far away echoed Dee’s distracted wittering, and the darkness bloomed. Not too near me; that was good. Near enough to see by, though; that was better. I skipped lightly off towards what looked like an opening I remembered. But as night closed around me again, and something slithered out from under my feet, I realised there was something else of Dee’s I definitely didn’t have – his sense of direction.

  I was fairly sure there were two channels forking ahead. I was a lot more sure I didn’t remember any such thing. And here came the light. I could take the old twit easily enough, snaffle his staff. For some reason I didn’t want to. Maybe if I just ducked down the left-hand fork for a few yards …

  About twenty minutes later, totally disoriented, I went blundering towards
the first grey glimmer of light. Dee or no Dee, anything visible looked like a picture of Heaven. But it wasn’t Dee, it was something better, a tall shaft with iron rungs set in solid masonry, and a blessed draught of clean air filtering down through a grille. Blue sky, even! All the same, I climbed up warily, and peered up through the bars before heaving them impatiently out of the way. I scrambled frantically up on to – yes! – a modern tarred road, cool in morning sunlight. Tall buildings, Victorian stone frontages, flagged pavements, streetlights, white lines – the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. A bike clattered by in the next street, strangely loud. Flowerbeds and fat glossy shrubs glowed through shinning railings that stretched around the corner – Paradise.

  I giggled deliriously. This was my own time. Wherever the hell this was, it was home.

  After a moment, though, it looked a little less familiar. There were streetcar rails and cables, which we didn’t have; but no streetcars. No traffic at all, in sight, and the barest background hum, far less than you’d expect. No pedestrians either; nobody. Well, Sunday morning early, maybe. But the buildings looked odd, and the road signs. All consonants, and enough Zs to give a Scrabble player nightmares—

  Sod it, I was still in Prague. Oh well, there were worse places, even without a passport. At least they wouldn’t point out the lack with rubber hoses and battery terminals in sensitive orifices, as they did back in Communist days. I could fake amnesia, plead the headaches or something; sooner or later they’d send me home. Hell, I could tell them the truth. Instant breakdown.

  Unless of course … Back in Communist days …

  There was just a hint of that coal-smoke in the air. Everything looked just a bit old-fashioned, old-style. No TV aerials. And the road signs weren’t Euro-standard … I began to whimper a little.

  And then there was the most godawful bang.

  Another, and the whistle of flying debris that clanged against the railings. And voices screaming, and a loud popping chatter I didn’t realise was automatic gunfire, punctuated with deeper pops, like heavier weapons. The air zinged like bees, the shrubbery shook and tore, the flowerbeds disintegrated in sprays of petals. Three men came charging round the corner, men in rough, shabby clothes and caps pulled down over their faces. For an instant I was looking down the barrels of the guns they held, big revolvers and maybe Stenguns, still smoking. I was staring at distorted faces, wide-eyed, snarl-mouthed, unshaven and streaked with sweat and smutches and one great streak of blood. Then they were running past, around the corner, their footsteps clattering into a sidestreet where the rails didn’t go.

  More footsteps, and suddenly the world was full of gun muzzle again, black and nasty, but not half as bad as the sweat-shining grimace behind it. Framed in a black steel helmet, it could have modelled for Mr Squarehead 1939. Mind you, it was the twin white zigzag S-runes on the shield badge that really burned in the comic-book icon.

  Luckily years of study had programmed in the right reaction. I cowered, screamed and pointed wildly. ‘Nein, mir nicht! Dahin, drei Tschechischer mit Pistolen! Dahin!’

  The complete Untermensch, that’s Maxie.

  The SS guard hesitated angrily. I wasn’t one of the men he’d been chasing. Worse, I might be a Sudeten German he wasn’t allowed to shoot out of hand. Suddenly a black Mercedes roared around the corner, its flanks scorched and dented and spattered with red to match the ragged bonnet pennant, limp arms dangling over the doors. It figured. I could guess who one of them was, now. Other black uniforms came clattering along the pavement.

  ‘He da!’ screamed the guard. ‘Halten Sie mir dieser! Im Strengarret! Ihr andere, folgen!’ He went pounding off, and I was suddenly submerged in black uniforms and shiny leather overcoats.

  ‘Hey!’ said a high, breathy voice. ‘Don’t you get yourself into some real hot shit, huh?’

  ‘Ar! Ever in broils, that’s a bold Maxie!’

  ‘But like to suffer de questioning—’

  A coiled whip tilted my chin. ‘And who can aid you, señor, but we?’

  I initiated emergency strategy, which was to close my eyes and wail.

  When I opened them again the all too familiar faces were crowded even closer round me, cutting off the light with their peaked caps, so close I could have felt their hot breath on my cheeks. Only I didn’t. Eyes glittered, teeth shone – closer still, suffocatingly close. The rat had left the sewer, and the hounds were on it.

  I never did like blood sports.

  ‘Cease!’ The voice was high and querulous, but it carried a startling authority. ‘Stand back! Whatever your purpose, this man is but a weak sinner. Why should such as you seek to have your way through fear? I abjure you in brotherly love, stand back!’

  And astonishingly, they did – or rather the crush parted like a curtain. There, still in his swirling robes, stood Dee, staff outstretched, lined face anxious but firm. One of the women laughed. Somehow it sounded hollower than before.

  I’m not the one to waste a good exit. I heard Dee shout my name, but I was across that road in two leaps. May 27th, 1943, was not a time to hang around most places. Least of all Prague, where the Czech resistance had just sold one Reinhard Heydrich, aka the Blond Beast or the Butcher to his friends, if any, some internal air-conditioning. Triggering off still more butchery, including the whole village of Lidice. That would cast a shadow, if anything would. But how the hell did my little bandit friends fit in? The grating lay open before me; and I damn near jumped.

  Splash, splish, splup, unpleasantly back the way I’d come. It had to be – didn’t it? There was just that one channel, the flow went the same way, eventually, after about an hour, the floor began to slope up again. All of which didn’t explain the inconvenient door I ran into. Maybe I’d just gone past it or something; maybe it hadn’t been closed then. Maybe the Pope would have triplets.

  Tentatively I tried it. The latch was rusted stiff, creaked like a bastard but it turned. There were no angry shouts from the other side, just faint, peculiar gurgles and there were enough of those back here anyhow. Light seamed the crack. Eagerly I pushed it wider, poked my head around and stared into a long, low vault lined with …

  Barrels, great fat things gurgling cheerfully in their bellies and letting loose some pretty sewery stinks themselves. I resisted the temptation to just accidentally tap the odd bung, and tiptoed through. They might keep bottles further on.

  They didn’t; but there were a couple of windows of a sort, narrow, dirty slots at gutter level, their tiny bubble panes barred with iron bars. There were voices out there, what sounded like massed voices singing, harsh and monotonous, and the tramp of feet. Beyond them was a wooden stair and a solid trapdoor, with a bolt I had to coax back. I clambered nervously into light, pretty dim but after sewer and cellar it was blinding. Another long, low vaulted room, empty, this time with tables and bottles and jugs, and all sorts of sausages and things hanging from the rafters by the big fireplace. A tavern of some kind; things were improving. Above the fireplace was some kind of inscription painted on the smoke-stained breast, big German letters – fraktur – but all those consonants again. Back in Prague, about the time I’d left, by the look of things. Well, too bad. I’d just have to start again. At least I could pick up a couple of candles this time.

  I rummaged around as quietly as I could, but all I could find were small earthenware pot lamps smeared with puddles of burnt-out suet, maybe, and nothing to light them with. I sidled to the big door and listened. It sounded like the open air out there, with all those voices chanting some kind of hymn or psalm. I rubbed my hands. Nice, gentle God-fearing types, always that bit more ready to give you the benefit of the doubt. I waited till it slackened a bit, then tugged the door open. A street all right, creaky old Prague-type rooftops, but fuller than Trafalgar Square at New Year or Times Square in the convention season. It looked like a thousand people, mostly on their knees in the clag, gazing raptly up at some bozo in black robe and tatty ruffle haranguing them. Others were just kibitzing, bunches
of soldiers hanging about, scratching under their breastplates, and commanders on horseback under bright banners, looking bored. Come to that, a lot of the worshippers were carrying weapons, and some of them lethal-looking flails and scythes that made me think of Willum. A young fellow, leaning against the wall watching, turned to me in surprise. I smiled sickeningly and switched on the German again.

  ‘Entschuldigen Sie mir, bitte, aber haben Sie—’

  I didn’t expect the killing glare I got. ‘Nemecku? Jsi speher Zikmundov? ’ Hands came from everywhere, hauled me bodily out, and this time I was looking down a dagger blade. The conventicle or whatever it was ran down, and just about everybody and his wife came pressing in around me, pointing and muttering darkly, ‘Speher! Speher! ’

  Of course, you can’t rely on the way words sound between languages. Ask any Frenchman confronted with the word ‘con-trick’, or any Anglo with the German road signs Einfahrt and Ausfahrt. Or anyone who heard the howl that went up when they paged some poor Austrian at the airport – ‘Will Herr Prick please go to Gate 26?’ There’re some words that do sound a lot alike, though. Like for example speher – espion – spione. Spy.

  ‘Hej!’ screamed the young twerp. ‘Hejtmany! Speher Zikmundov, uz je to jiste!’

  The crowd all started shouting, then fell back as orders were bellowed and a knot of soldiers came through, pushing them back with their pike staves. Plated leather gauntlets clamped round my arms and hauled me roughly along. A hard-faced bunch, with great greasy beards like moulting yaks; unlikely they’d be the charitable type. Soldiers meant questions, and questions, since they hadn’t discovered electricity or rubber hoses yet, meant toenails, or teeth. Or worse. And I didn’t even know who the hell Zigmund was.

  They dragged me off through the jeering crowd. I was shouting, ‘Kein Spione! Bin Englander! ’ but I suspected England didn’t actually show up much on their mental horizons. We were heading for the guys on horseback. OK, maybe the officers might be better educated. I tore myself free, which wasn’t too hard since the guard was about to throw me, anyhow, and threw myself on my knees before the tallest horse, a massive carthorse sort of thing.