by KJ Charles
“And chose not to mention that.”
We had climbed a rise as we talked and now stood on some little height, staring over a view that, in more clement weather, would have been astounding. Around us stretched the greys and greens of scrubgrass, heather, moss and lichened granite. Penmadown Wood was behind us; ahead was only moorland.
“The very definition of a blasted heath,” I said with a shiver.
“You are a city creature.” Simon took a huge breath of the very cold air. “This is cleansing.”
“It’s freezing. Simon, is it possible Dando was summoned to do someone’s bidding? Could someone mean to use him, or it, to control Lord Westerbury?”
Simon made a face of revulsion. “Politics. But I must assume the Fat Man sent us here for a reason… No. No, not us, of course, but you. A journalist, a political animal with his nose in all sorts of corners. That is why he selected me over any other ghost-hunter, is it not? Because I have you.”
“I think so.” I could not tell if the icy sensation down my back was the dripping of water off the brim of my hat and down my collar, or not. “He directed our thoughts towards conspiracy, even stated that Mr. Parker is not above the law.”
Simon glowered. “What does this mean?”
“Mr. Parker operates by influence,” I said, thinking it through. “Lord Westerbury is becoming a rival. Mr. Parker wants either to control or to remove him, but he is wealthy, well connected, no hints of scandal, not easily intimidated. So let us say Mr. Parker commands Dr. Berry to raise a ghost—can he?”
“Any fool can. The trick is to control it.”
“Dr. Berry raises the spirit. If Lord Westerbury cancels the planned gathering, his position of influence is badly compromised. If he does not, then presumably he will be given the choice: to oppose Mr. Parker, with two dead men as a delicate hint as to the consequences, or to take those dead men as a gift from his master. Am I too cynical? Is this beyond what Mr. Parker would do?”
“Very little is,” Simon said grimly. “He has always regarded the world beneath the world as a resource to be used. And Dr. Berry can help him use it.”
The wind whipped and tugged at our coats. I clapped a hand to my hat, staring out at the bleak prospect. “What can we do?”
“Test the theory. Find if this is a summoning; if it is, find the summoner, and end it, before there are more deaths.”
“And let the Fat Man deal with Mr. Parker?”
“I think so. We can only do our part, Robert.”
Rain splattered my face, and I turned my back to the driving wind. “Can you—?” I gestured at his chest.
“I doubt it. If Dando is present in this world, his spirit will not cry out. And in any case a ghost so old…”
He made a face. I recalled his contact with the ancient butterfly bishop, and said, hastily, “No, you must not. But what, then?”
“I could wish to have Theodosia here,” Simon muttered. “She is the great expert. But…” He hefted his small black Gladstone bag. “I dare say I can do something.”
“You are going to summon Dando?” I enquired, not very enthusiastically.
“Of course not.” He knelt on the sodden ground, ferreting in his bag. “I shall enact a quaero vestigiis, a search for footprints, as it were. Have you seen this before?” He slipped something out of a velvet case and handed it to me. It was a stone or glass disc, I could not tell which, absolutely black. It was polished to a smoothness that made it feel almost unreal to my fingers, as though it were not there at all, and when I looked into it, despite the high sheen, I could see no reflection. I tilted it, staring into the depths.
“Don’t play the fool,” Simon said, whisking it from my fingers.
“What is it?”
“Obsidian. A scrying-glass. This is a little difficult, and I do not use it unless I must.” He squatted, balancing the thing on his broad thighs, and began to murmur under his breath. As he spoke, he flicked the cork from a flask with his thumb, and poured the contents out onto the disc: a fine grey powder. One might have expected that to be whipped away by the wind. It was not. It formed a heap, instead, one that slowly spread outwards over the smooth surface.
Simon took out a penknife and sliced into the tip of his little finger, a deep enough cut that the blood welled at once and ran freely. He circled his hand over the scrying-glass, still whispering. The blood dripped onto the dust and…sank in. Not as water soaks into earth, but falling, as though the polished blackness was suddenly a tunnel, a hole that led very far down indeed.
I looked at his face. He was staring into the pit he held, and what he saw I do not know, but the veins stood in rigid relief against his pallid skin.
When I looked back at the obsidian disc, it was a smooth surface once more, clean of blood or dust. Just black.
“Now.” Simon’s voice rasped. “Ostende mihi.” Show me.
The glass clouded, as though it had been breathed on, but not on the surface. Underneath, rather, as if something had exhaled from the other side.
Then there were pictures, forming in miniature on the surface, with perfect clarity.
“Seen through a glass, darkly,” I whispered, and Simon gave me a short nod.
I saw a small figure in emptiness. On the moor, I realised. A man, crouched at his work, and a big black horse tethered by him, tossing its head, shifting in discomfort.
“He’s in pentacle,” Simon murmured. “Is the horse a sacrifice, or a steed?”
“I can’t see his face,” I said. “Is it—”
“No names.”
The picture became larger, as though our vantage point were coming nearer to its subject. The man was indeed within a large pentacle, made of heaped earth and stone, with pale sticks delineating its shape. Bones, I realised. There were unmoving huddled shapes at each point. Dead animals.
“Foxes,” Simon said. “Clever.”
The man finished his close work in the pentacle. He tilted his head back to the sky, eyes shut, mouth moving and we both said, “Ah,” confirmation rather than realisation.
Dr. Berry.
His chant was silent in the scrying-glass, but I could feel it gathering strength, I knew that around him the light was being sucked from the air. The glass seemed to vibrate. Its surface clouded again, a roiling fog. The tethered horse reared, front legs striking the air, and Simon gasped, “Desistite!”
The surface of the glass cleared instantly, and now—for the first time, I realised—the rain began to leave droplets on it. Simon rocked backwards, and if I had not taken his weight, I think he must have fallen. His little finger looked white and shrivelled, as though it had lost a great deal of blood.
“Are you all right?” I asked, pointlessly. He did not reply, but he leaned against me for just a few seconds, breathing deeply, before he straightened up and moved to return the scrying-glass to its velvet bag. “You didn’t want to see Dando come?”
“The glasses have a tendency to break under stress,” Simon said. “And are damned expensive to replace. I think there can be no doubt, Robert. We need to see Dr. Berry again.”
We tramped back down the hill, sodden and chilled, only to learn that Lord Westerbury and Dr. Berry had already left Penmadown House.
“Gone to moors,” the footman repeated, quavering a little in the face of Simon’s ferocious questioning. “Up to Lanjore Hill.”
“Where is that?” Simon demanded. “Damnation, this is urgent!”
The footman pointed us to the footpath, informing us that it was no more than a mile, and added that his master had taken the carriage.
“Let us hurry.” Simon set off at a spanking pace that made it clear he would not hear further enquiries about his health.
“You think we alarmed Berry?” I asked, half running to keep up.
“As like as not. In any case, the political guests arrive tomorrow. Berry had to make his offer soon.”
I nodded in agreement, so as to save my breath, and hurried at his heels.
&n
bsp; The footpath led us upwards. It split at one point, without signposts, as is apparently compulsory for country roads. Simon paused, eyes distant, then sucked in a breath as though he had been struck, clenching his arms around himself for a brief moment.
“Simon?”
“He is coming.”
“You mean Dr. Berry?” I said hopefully.
“No.”
We more or less ran up the steeper path, slipping and stumbling and gasping. It was raining in earnest now, coming across us in grey waves, and the sky growing darker. I wiped my wet hair from my eyes as we crested the hill and saw the men we sought.
Lord Westerbury, that fierce soldier and accomplished politician, was on his knees in the mud, huddled in white-faced terror. Dr. Berry stood before him, pointing out at the sky. He was brandishing a fox’s brush, the white-tipped fur sodden and bedraggled, and I could hear him shouting. The words were unclear, but I recognised the tone. Oh, I recognised it, and the marrow went from my bones at the sound.
“Berry!” Simon roared.
Dr. Berry swung round, startled, and his face changed as he saw us. He hissed, a serpent sound that carried over the wind and rain, and Simon gave a wordless growl in response.
I had no desire to get between them. I ducked sideways, edging round a few paces to get a clear sight of Lord Westerbury. The terrified plea in his eyes as he looked to me, this man who had commanded troops and supervised a massacre…
I glanced at Berry. He was advancing on Simon, shouting, so I ran to the old soldier.
“Can you move?”
“That man,” Westerbury wheezed. “He said, if I didn’t… He said…”
“We need to leave this hill.” I tugged at his arm. “Get up. Get up. The Hunt is coming.”
“Jesu help me,” Westerbury whispered. “Lord save me.”
I could hear it now, in the sky, the baying of hounds, a dreadful clamour several notes deeper than the sound of geese, and above it, the brassy blast of a hunting horn. I put my hands under Westerbury’s armpits and heaved, but he was immovable, as heavy and unwieldy as a corpse, every bit of sense he had left focused on the skies, and the darkness that swept towards us, and the Hunt.
Dr. Berry was screaming at Simon, words lost in the howling wind. Simon, face granite as the hill we stood on, stared out at the oncoming storm.
Too late to run. Nowhere to hide on this bleak hill, except behind Simon, and he was busy. I locked my knees and planted a hand on Westerbury’s shoulder—I hoped he took it as reassurance; in fact, I needed the support—and faced what came.
The hunting horn rang out again. Hoofbeats thundered towards us, sounding on nothing. The black horse, sweating and frothing, landed on the hill and reared up with a neigh that sounded like a shriek. Beads of rain shone on the coarse black hairs of its coat, and as it went back down to four legs, I concluded that, gallop through the air though it had, it was real.
Dogs flowed like water around it, and the part of me that never ceases to observe noted that the men had been accurate eyewitnesses. Pack of smoke, they had called the dogs, and that was right. They were indeterminate shapes, solidifying into dog form if you stared at one closely, until it melted back into the mass. Only the eyes were clear, those holes into the world beneath, and I did not want to look at those.
If the horse was real and the dogs were not, God alone knows what the rider was. A stout, florid, elderly man of the John Bull sort, the kind whose raucous jollity was but a thin veneer over cruel temper. His eyes gave that away, gleaming with malevolence. I should have said he was red-faced and wearing a bright huntsman’s coat, except that I seemed to see him through shadows.
Westerbury whimpered helplessly. I could not blame him.
Berry was chanting. Simon’s voice rose over him, addressing the huntsman. “Go. Leave this place or be sent howling. Begone!”
“You will do my commands,” Berry called, equally loud. “I summoned you, I freed you, I gave you your steed, and you will ride.” He went back to his chant, a dreadful penetrating whisper, and I heard Simon’s deep tones pronounce the strange resonant syllables of the Saaamaaa Ritual.
He’s using the Sixth Line, I thought, with the strange abstraction that terror brings. I expect we’re going to die, then.
Dando gave a roar of fury, mouth opening wide to reveal not teeth or tongue but a deep, dark hole. Berry shrieked his own incantation, challenging Simon’s, and if Simon’s words sounded like bronze gongs, Berry’s were retched up, wet and fleshy sounds. The two did not go together at all, not at all. They seemed to snarl and tangle in one another, the sounds dragging at my ear. The air smelled of tin.
“You are my creature!” Berry cried. “Take your prey!” He pointed at Simon with the hand that held the bedraggled foxtail. The horseman’s head turned, sighting, and the dogs stopped their endless movement and stiffened as one, ready to pounce.
Simon was shouting the syllables of the Ritual, feet wide, braced against all comers, as he would always be until he found the opponent he could not defeat, but I feared he had found it now. The Ritual commanded creatures from the world beneath, and Dando, on his flesh and blood horse, was all too firmly here.
The horseman stiffened in his saddle, pointing down at Simon, and raised the horn to his lips. Dr. Berry watched, spectacles glistening with rain, mouth stretched in a terrible smile.
He was not even looking at me when I collided with him.
As I have mentioned, I am not a large man, but surprise can do a great deal, and so can the prospect of one’s lover dying in front of one’s eyes. I hit Berry from the side as I had learned in long-ago games of rugby at school, sending him lurching, and as he staggered, I snatched the fox’s tail from his hand.
Dando’s head snapped round, to me. Berry lunged at me, and I leapt backwards, stumbling on a loose stone underfoot. I flung out my arms to keep myself upright, the wind cracked like a whip, and the brush was snatched from my hand, tumbling upwards into the sky, vanishing in an instant.
Dando turned his head again, slowly this time, back to Dr. Berry.
The doctor’s mouth worked. I expected that look of terrible certainty to settle on his face again, but it did not. He took a step back, another. He was shaking.
The horse came forward a slow, deliberate pace, and to my horror, Simon took a long stride to stand in front of it, arms out. “Run, damn you!” he bellowed—at Berry, not at me—and shouted words at the horseman that were sucked into nothing.
The air was hot now, so hot that raindrops were evaporating with little sizzles. The horse advanced another step, its breath ruffling Simon’s hair, and I grabbed his arm, and pulled with all my weight.
Simon stumbled sideways. Berry screamed, thin and desperate, the kind of airless semi-sound that is all one can make in a nightmare. He turned then, turned to run, and the dogs flowed forward to surround him.
It would have been kinder if the dogs had torn him to pieces, instead of holding him. It would have been kinder, even, had Dando ridden forward quickly, instead of step by slow step.
Simon strained against me. I had my arms round his neck, my legs wrapped round one of his, holding him back with everything I had.
Dando reached down and plucked up Dr. Berry by the shoulder. The doctor screamed once more, and this time he could scream, and we could hear it. The horse took one pace forward, then broke into a trot. Its muscles bunched, and it leapt from the ground, the dogs baying at its heels. Dr. Berry dangled from Dando’s hold, legs kicking like a child’s puppet, as the Wild Hunt took to the sky. Then it was gone, horse, dogs, rider and captive, with a single shriek left ringing in our ears.
I released my grip on Simon and slid down his body to the ground. The wet, muddy, solid ground on which perfectly normal icy rain was falling. I tipped my head back to the sky and breathed hard.
After a moment I realised that Simon was sitting by me.
“If you are expecting remorse, you shall not have it,” I said. “He was not worth your l
ife.”
“I could not merely watch.” That might have been a rebuke, but it sounded very like an apology.
“I thought it was going to kill you.” I am not ashamed that my voice broke on the words.
Simon pulled me close. “Come, no harm done. To us, at least.”
“Easy to say.” I wiped water irritably from my cheeks. It was raining particularly heavily. “You persist in plunging us into these situations without the slightest consideration for the consequences to me or yourself. I do not know why I tolerate you.”
“Nor do I but I hope you will continue.” His arm tightened a little, in lieu of a kiss, then he released me. “Lord Westerbury needs help.” He rose, tugging me up with him, and we walked over to the fallen man on the empty, rainswept hilltop.
Lord Westerbury did not recover. I do not know if it was the influence Dr. Berry had exerted—we found handfuls of silver coins in his lordship’s pockets—or the sights he had seen, but he was struck dumb and mindless from then on. He died a few months later, the last victim of Dando and his dogs.
We gave our information and speculations to the Fat Man. I cannot say what happened in the back corridors where strange business is discussed in whispers, but Mr. Parker was removed from his obscure, powerful office shortly afterwards, and his fall was as steep as his ambitions had been lofty. Unwanted servants of the state are usually retired with honours to compensate for their lost position; Mr. Parker was stripped of power, influence and credit at once. He and the Fat Man had fought a savage Whitehall war, and the victor was not merciful.
The Fat Man was grateful to us, I think. Simon did not give a damn for his gratitude and resigned from the Diogenes Club forthwith.
“I say, Feximal,” Carnacki remarked one evening at the Remnant, as we sat in the members’ lounge, quietly reading. “I haven’t seen Berry in a while. Do you know what’s become of him?”
Simon dislikes having his attention taken from a book. “Dragged to hell,” he said, turning the page. “Screaming.”
“Was he, now?” Carnacki did not sound unduly surprised. “Well, I’ll be damned. Or rather, I suppose, he will.”
