Maxie’s Demon

by Michael Scott Rohan

  ‘Where nothing should appear,’ said Dee quietly. ‘Yet something – there!’

  Molten metal hissed down into the water, and I nearly had heart failure. But as the distorted nodules sank hissing to the floor of the trough, there was no mistaking that dull sheen. Rudolph plunged his hand in, and caught up the still steaming metal. I held out my hand, and he tipped it into my palm. It was heavy.

  ‘Lead!’ said Dee, bitterly, leaning over. ‘But a mere tenth part of what was put in. I recall there was always some lead still among the gold that emerged. You remember, do you not, Edward? I thought that so convincing, that the transformation should not yet be entire …’

  With a sudden, savage gesture Rudolph drew his dagger and smashed at the iron pipe with the hilt. The abrupt cooling had probably cracked it anyway. Glinting gold rolled in lacy fragments across the floor.

  I smashed the bucket down on the appendix pipe, which sagged and broke off. I stooped after it.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Rudolph.

  I fumbled it up, and showed him the open end. The tube was clogged with the same dull leaden gleam.

  The Holy Roman Emperor spat out something so unholy it even amazed me. Then he waved a hand to the captain, who dropped Kelley and saluted. Rudolph turned on his heel and stalked out, the alarmed pikemen fluttering out of his path like electroplated pigeons.

  The captain made a noise like a bomb in a bucket of phlegm.

  ‘A-hem! The aforesaid demonstration has not been carried out to the satisfaction of His Imperial Majesty’s inspecting officer, namely myself. The practice is therefore deemed to be illegal, corrupt and unholy. I am therefore commanded to escort any persons suspected of such illegal activities to the palace, at once. Of course this could not possibly involve His Excellency the Doctor Dee, who is above suspicion and has in any case never made any material claims. Your Excellency Master Maxie—’

  He fixed me with the beady eye all cops everywhere seem to develop just for me. But then he bowed.

  ‘—is but newly arrived, and has given meritorious service. Therefore, the Emperor bids me present his compliments to you, and will you please to inform His Excellency Sir Edward Kelley that he is to accompany us without delay?’

  Kelley did the classic pale-to-purple bit.

  ‘Me?’ he screamed. ‘Have you lost your iron-skulled wits? I’ve never—’

  He looked about frantically for a way out, as the pikemen closed in. ‘I’m innocent! It would have worked—’

  The captain’s eye turned even beadier. ‘Du ist mich instantlich mit comingk! Oder ist your arsch oot o’the windae! Zu Befehl!’

  Clearly a bright lad, this, though no grammarian. And maybe overinfluenced by those Scots mercenaries.

  Would have worked?

  Shaky with released tension, I leaned on the table. The broken pipe, heavy with the weight of metal inside, was still burning my palm, and maybe I deserved it, just a little. I was still dizzy with the speed I’d had to react, not once but twice, and with the thought of what might have happened. It brought me out in the mother of all cold sweats.

  If Rudolph had thought to look closer … But he was already humiliated enough.

  If Kelley had thought to look closer …

  But then he’d never really believed his machine worked, or ever could. I contemplated the stringy gobbets of lead the Emperor had spilled from the trough. The Romans had used those to tell fortunes, once; and they’d certainly told mine. It was lucky I’d been able to palm enough of them to press into the open end of the appendix pipe.

  Enough to cover up what it was really full of.

  Not that Kelley knew. He hadn’t even bothered to look, or demand a closer examination. Lead was what he’d expected me to find. But this once, just this once, his little gadget had only served to divert the evidence that would have vindicated him, and left us well and truly screwed. Royally, you might say.

  This once the transformation had come through. He really had made gold.

  There he was, shouting about his innocence. He’d conned everyone, but he’d ended up conning himself. And then I’d had to con him, too.

  The quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Well, OK.

  Why had it worked? It never had before, that was obvious. It couldn’t have, or Kelley would have found out when he melted the metal back out of the appendix. Maybe he’d managed to tap the power of the Spiral at long last – through the extra excitement and intensity of working under pressure, perhaps. But there was a nastier possibility. Could somebody else have started to feed him power, as they had me with the phone? Maybe that aborted ritual had left him some kind of link, after all. One that could liberate him, just as it had me. If this went any further the dung could really hit the windmill …

  The captain bowed again. ‘Please to inform His Excellency that he will be still given every opportunity to prove the worth of his process. An apartment is to be provided in the quietest tower of a remote castle, well furnished with all his apparatus, where nothing else at all may distract His Excellency’s labours. Until, of course, in the fullness of time His Excellency is crowned with success. Please to inform him of that.’

  A remote castle. Far away from Prague, far away from the margins of the Spiral, no doubt. Where nothing really could reach him.

  Nothing at all.

  ‘Captain,’ I said, and bent a bit myself, ‘it’s going to be a positive pleasure.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Dip in Road

  THE THUDDING SOUND grew louder as the ponies splashed on.

  ‘In truth,’ apologised Dee for about the thousandth time, ‘I am sorry to convey you home with such scanty honour. No carriage, no escort even.’

  I laughed. ‘I’ve told you. I don’t need those!’ The last time I had an escort, I’d been handcuffed to him.

  Dee’s beard wagged. ‘You are kind, sir! And certainly it befits a scholar to make no undue display on his travels. I had thought, perhaps, if our endeavours had been successful, to travel homeward in great style, but I am chastened for that. Now I shall have only what is necessary for my poor Lady Jane and me. No more than a few carriages – four, perhaps, even three. A train of wagons for our modest baggage, a dozen or so outriders, a few men at arms that we shall hire by stages. The world will scarcely see us pass. Poor Edward! Poor Edward!’

  ‘Well,’ I said, trying to derail that particular train of thought, ‘a carriage and cavalry escort wouldn’t fit in very well, down here. Might cause a nasty blockage, in fact.’

  ‘Aye, that is so,’ he answered, quite seriously. Almost without thinking he turned his mount’s head under a low mould-grown arch I would probably have missed. The note of the splashing changed, and the throbbing grew louder still. ‘Know you, I mean to petition Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth that she shall recover poor Edward from Rudolph’s grasp.’

  ‘You know,’ I said very carefully, ‘he did play you a couple of nasty turns. And he could have gotten you in shit a lot deeper than this with old Rudolph.’

  ‘Oh aye, I know it well. You have been a true friend to me in uncovering it, though a painful one. But I cannot abandon him thus, poor, misguided fellow, not after so many years of labouring in my vineyard. Much of what he did was in frustration at our failures, I am sure, and in expectation of pleasing me. Her Majesty will surely not refuse to ransom a man of such qualities. I shall write him so, often, that he lose not hope.’

  I gave up. Kelley was part of Dee’s world, the world where angels talked to him and he passed on their messages to respectful kings and statesmen. The fact that Kelley had mostly been planting vines of his own, and nasty ones too, seemed to have passed him by. Endlessly forgiving people is the easy way out, so much easier than facing the facts about them; and about yourself. The Kelleys of this world know that. So do the Maxies, come to that, but we’re not so good at milking it.

  Still, by all accounts old Bessie was an even tougher nut than Rudolph, a real brick-in-the-handbag artist. She might
like Dee, but she wouldn’t lift more than the odd finger for Kelley. As Kelley was probably well aware; and banged up in the middle of nowhere, with no hope but screeds of encouraging bleatings from Dee, might just be a heavier punishment than the bastard deserved.

  That made it about right, by me.

  The metallic clunking of the engines shook the foul air now. Dee held his staff up, and I saw the sloping ramp, its concrete cracked and weed-grown; but it could have been the stairway to Heaven. ‘There lies your way,’ he said. ‘But I would not take my leave of you in these noisome depths. I shall join you for a moment upon the marches of your strange future.’

  When we emerged into the air it was still crisp night, and the stars were glittering cheerfully, considering what was rising up to them. I noticed the noise at once, even over the chug of the pumping gear. The hum and buzz struck deep in the ears, the beehive drone of modern life. Especially the bits of it I kept nicking.

  ‘I regret I shall never see this world of yours, with all its wonders,’ said Dee wistfully. ‘But still more so that I shall never again enjoy your company. Fare you well, my boy, and fall not back into your old ill ways. There is more of good in you than many I have heard called honest and esteemed. I cannot now give you the rewards you were promised, for all your toil, but here is a trifle in token.’ He passed me a pouch, which clinked interestingly. ‘Ah, and this is a letter also, from my lady Jane, and from – ahem! – Mistress Joan. Would you credit it, they made me swear it should not be opened in my presence. Ah, womanish as ever!’ He chuckled fondly.

  So did I, for different reasons. Not that different, come to think of it. ‘You look after yourself, too. I mean, I’m not saying give up on the angels, OK? Just the mediums. If someone says they’ve picked up a message for you, well, you could ask why the angels don’t deliver it directly. Look at it this way – the medium is the message!’

  Dee thought a moment, then nodded. ‘Most profound, my boy; most profound. Well, this is our parting, I fear. Come clip me now!’

  Being embraced by a man is not exactly my idea of fun; I had some close shaves in the nick, being small, blond and young. Still, it was the way in Dee’s time. Old Loew had done it too, and at least Dee didn’t have oil and garlic in his beard. Loew’s was like a salad.

  Apart from all that, as I watched Dee lead the patient ponies plodding away back down that nasty slope, I realised I was going to miss them both. They hadn’t approved of what I was, but nor had they screamed, or preached, or patronised – much. There was something to be said for the religious approach. Maybe I ought to try it one day, if I could find something I believed in – First Reformed Seventh-Day Ferrari Fetishists?

  More likely Hell on Wheels, Maxie.

  I stood there a moment, feeling very lonely. Then I opened the envelope, and read it in the dim glare of the sewage farm’s lights. There was a letter, and if you want to know what it said, you mind your own business. Besides, I’ve no idea what her standard of comparison was, anyhow; though something suggested it was more than just the other two. Or maybe that was Joan’s expert opinion. But there was also a ring, and a very nice one too, gold with a blue stone. At least this wasn’t going in the hockshop, no matter what.

  Mind you, I’d said that about my watch, and the old man’s too. Even true champions and flame-bodied lovers have to eat.

  The purse had gold in it, nice bright, new Austrian thalers that any expert would recognise on sight – as a forgery, because they were that new. I knew a bloke who could take care of that, though it’d be a fresh experience for him ageing something genuine. All told, I probably had at least a grand’s worth here, at collector’s prices. And sitting waiting in my little roof-nook hideout, if the rozzers hadn’t happened upon it – and I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they hadn’t – was another sweet, sexy fifty times that.

  My ears practically rang at the thought of it. I needed a drink to celebrate this. And where better than the Wheel? Lots of places, since you ask; but at least it was nearby, and that’s always a good point in a bar. I could have another go at getting around Poppy – or rather, over. Or under. Or wrapped around, or all of the above, choose one from each column. Maybe I could show her Jane’s letter as a reference.

  The thought buoyed me up so much I practically floated along the path back, even without external power. It took longer on foot, and seemed to have developed a few extra turnings since I’d last passed that way, but I kept the Wheel firmly in mind. It didn’t seem to be so very long before I came in sight of the village outskirts, and saw over the thatches, against the greying sky, the pointy poplar stand which marked the pub.

  Greying. Sod. They’d probably all be still in bed, and I’d have to wait for my drink. Still, maybe I could catch Poppy in her nightdress, or better still out of it. I sauntered down the path, hopping over puddles and kicking stones like the eight-year-old I probably am. After everything I’d been through, the place almost looked like home. I strolled into the village, hearing the cocks crow and smiling benignly at the scrubby watchdogs that yapped at me from their tethers.

  What did all-purpose Ye Oldes have for breakfast? Bread, of course; eggs; bacon; sausages, surely. Maybe not coffee or tea, though; but I could face beer. Mulled, with spices, to take the chill off. I’d earned it, after the things I’d been through, after the first awful night I’d taken that path. Maybe Fisher would be there, and I could tell him just what I thought of him and his advice. You could see the path from here, at the crossroads ahead, winding up the hill there, where those idiots were waving …

  Oh.

  Right at the top of the path, at the brow of the hill, lounging there as if they’d been waiting.

  Oh, shit.

  The crossroads lay between me and the pub. At the speed they moved, they could buzz down it in a moment and stuff me before I’d taken two steps across.

  One of the women cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted. ‘Going somewhere, Maxie?’

  I blinked. The voice was hers in pitch, but the accent was that of the jolly black guy. And he’d made almost the same movement. I was hypnotised, rat by snake; only this rat was more than commonly resentful. ‘You!’ I screamed back. ‘We exorcised you bastards! We cut you off! You can’t track me, you can’t tempt me any more! Where’d you bloody bubble up from?’

  ‘Not the same sewer as you, señor!’ This time it was the Oriental guy; only the timbre was female, and the words sounded like the Spanish woman.

  ‘Don’t get rid of us that easy, Maxie!’ called the blond man mockingly. ‘Cut off – huh! Why sweat it? We brought you here, we found you here! All we had to do was drift back’n just hang around. We knew we’d get you, sooner or later. Sooner it is, too. Gotcha now – and we’re not gonna lose you, not this time, not nohow. So why not make it easier and come talk like a civilised citizen?’

  He’d started the speech; but the Oriental took it over somewhere, seamlessly, and it finished in the black guy’s mouth, smiling as ever. I was beginning to understand at last, and it chilled my blood horribly. ‘Civilised? I talk to citizens with names! I don’t even know yours! I don’t know a damn thing about you!’

  They weren’t even bothering, any more. They just laughed – the same laugh, from mouth to mouth and back again, and sounding bigger, somehow, than all of them put together. ‘Go on!’ I shouted furiously across the dawn breeze. ‘You think you’ve got me? Then no reason you shouldn’t tell me your names, show me yourselves – all of you! Who’re the hidden ones? Who’s the real power behind you, the real face? Which of you was first?’

  ‘First?’ The laugh was huge and horrible. It seemed to shake the sleeping thatches and draw them in towards it, sucking them inward. A burst of baby squalling arose from behind one banging shutter. ‘There is no first! There was no first! Why should I remember, why should I know or care? I know only the now, and the next! There is only Me!’

  ‘Then what d’you want me for?’ I screamed, into the windy echoes. Leaves whirled up around my
head, dust stung my face. ‘Why won’t you bloody leave me alone?’

  The laugher was cold. ‘Because you have tasted Our power, Maxie! Because We know you will not resist it, not in the end!’

  ‘You bloody wish! But why me? Out of all the bloody Spiral, why chase me?’

  That did it. I understood then, even before they said anything; and they seemed to sense it, because they laughed that laugh again. ‘Because you are not of the Spiral, Maxie! Because We lured you out of the Core! To be Our bridge, Maxie, Our conduit! Our vessel, Our vehicle into a world that’s unprepared for Us, that cannot guard against Us! And through you, in you, We’ll grab life by the throat – not just the Spiral’s shifting shadow life, but to the Core!’

  ‘You bastards!’ I was vaguely aware of the hot tears streaking my cheeks. ‘You utter frigging bastards! You want to … take me over, don’t you? To ride me! To steal me! Like a bloody car!’

  And didn’t that raise a laugh. ‘You have stolen yourself, Maxie! If you’ll not come to Us, We’ll come down upon you! You drank of Our wine – you’re Ours for the taking!’

  It was more like an animal roar – a bestial one, certainly. The figures on the hillcrest seemed to lean together, straining like the landscape, as if I was watching it in a deforming foil mirror. It was nothing at all like computer animation, like morphing; nothing nice or fluid. It was a sucking, straining distortion that drew faces and limbs together into a vast, inchoate vortex, a whirling horror in which, for an instant, an individual feature would still be seen, stretched to a thread of familiar shape or colour. The bellow thundered across the dawning sky, and the poplars bent.

  ‘Come to me, Maxie. My name is Legion!’

  Out of the vortex the face took shape in a sudden bulging thrust, the nightmare face as I’d seen it, but solid now, no longer made of writhing human outlines – or at least you couldn’t see them. And it was vast. It was a wolf’s face, a bat’s, a man’s, a hairy predatory vision of every animal fear, lifting hot and steaming above the hillcrest. Through the boiling mists beneath its body rose, manlike, hulking, yet hung about with the same reeking, matted fur. And above its shoulders, vast as the hill itself, black wings hunched upward to blot out the dawn.