by Debi Gliori
After twenty-three-and-a-half minutes, Isagoth had to admit that the baby had, once more, got the better of him.
Babies, 3; Demons, 0.
Damp had woken up to the sound of the new baby screaming in the nursery. Hugging her pajama-case piggy for protection, she had listened with increasing horror as it hissed and spat and swore, its infant vocabulary encompassing several words that Damp just knew were very bad words indeed. Pulling pajama-pig closer, Damp did her best not to listen. She stuck her fingers in her ears and hummed loudly, trying to drown out the baby with songs and stories. First a rousing chorus of “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring,” which flowed into a dramatic “Hickory Dickory Dock” and then a wee spot of “Hushabye Baby” for afters. Thanks to Damp, rain poured down outside and, all round StregaSchloss, the clocks joined in to encourage the nursery-rhyme mouse; but, proving that the baby was immune to hushabyes, squeals, oaths, and hisses still echoed along the corridor from the nursery. Rolling her eyes, Damp pretended to be Cinderella’s fairy godmother dealing with a particularly foul-mouthed rat, a spell that transformed Don Lucifer’s rodent nose but left the new baby unchanged, unrepentant, and determinedly swearing and cursing, until finally Damp could take no more.
“HOBBIBLE baby,” she decided, pulling a hideous face and slipping out of bed to investigate.
As Damp tiptoed along the corridor, she heard an unfamiliar voice coming from the baby’s room. Her eyes grew wide. More bad words, and this time from a growed-up. Puzzled, she halted outside the open nursery door and risked a quick peek. One glance was all it took. Don Lucifer di S’Embowelli stood with his back to Damp, but slung over his shoulder was the new baby, its face crumpled like a collapsed pumpkin lantern, its mouth a torn gash of impotent fury. As it caught sight of Damp standing in the doorway, its shrieks abruptly ceased. Just before she turned and fled, the baby grinned at her, a feral, snaggletoothed rictus of pure, unadulterated hate.
Sobbing with terror—“Bad baby, bad baby”—Damp half fell, half slid down the stairs to the great hall, where she stood, chest heaving, nose running, her arms tightly wrapped around the one constant in this awful afternoon: her pajama-case piggy. Around her, the hall was empty, the house uncannily silent. Where was everyone? Didn’t they know there was a bad baby upstairs? Warily, she crept down the corridor to the kitchen and stopped outside the door. She would never know what sixth sense made her not turn the door handle and unwittingly deliver the Chronostone hidden in her pajama case straight across to the Dark Side. Years later, when she had grown into her own considerable powers as a magus, Damp would awake in the dead hours of night, trembling with the knowledge of disaster so narrowly averted. Whatever or whoever it was, something made Damp stop on the threshold of the kitchen and look up…
…and there, dangling in their thousands from the ceiling of the corridor, were the bats of Coire Crone, their wings unmoving, their eyes fastened on her, slowly blinking in the deep shadows of that midwinter evening.
A soft thud on her shoulder announced the arrival of her very own bat familiar, Vesper. He placed a warning wing over her mouth and whispered, “Stand away from the door, ma’am. We need to back away, niiice and easy, that’s it—Whoo-hoo, take it reeeeeeeal slowwww.”
Damp obeyed, not because she was in the habit of taking orders from Vesper but because she had felt something infinitely wrong coming from the kitchen. She backed away, hoping that whatever it was, it wouldn’t sense her presence on the other side of the door. She had no idea what was lurking in there; she just had the sneaking suspicion that whatever it was had big pointy teeth and black dripping claws, and did not have her future welfare at heart.
“Let’s hit the highway and get the heck outta Dodge, ma’am,” Vesper prompted, his tiny thumbs gesturing toward the front door. Clutching her piggy with white-knuckled fists, Damp was halfway across the hall when she heard a hideous scream coming from the kitchen. She froze, then spun round as the shadow of Don Lucifer and the baby began to descend the stairs toward her.
Damp needed no further encouragement. Skidding across the hall, she grabbed the heavy iron latch to the front door, lifted it, hauled with all her might, and, checking that Vesper was with her, fled from whatever evil lay behind in StregaSchloss.
Their Deepest Fears
S’tan had learned a great deal from twenty-first-century torturers when it came to extracting information. Not for Him the brutal, bloodstained torture methods of medieval times. He didn’t need to use pliers, racks, or thumbscrews to persuade His victims to sing like canaries. As He’d been fond of pointing out to His students back when He used to teach the degree course in Advanced Pain at the University of Hades, all that was required to turn victims into sobbing, blurting, willing confessors was the application of a little insight, coupled with a few handy techniques He’d garnered from jails and detention centers back on Earth. Here in the kitchen at StregaSchloss, He was about to put some of these lessons to good use, but first He had to make sure that these stupid humans didn’t rush suicidally to each other’s defense. To prevent this from happening, He stopped Time.
This was a trick He could only have pulled off when the Chronostone was very near indeed; within, say, a few yards of where He stood. Stopping Time had the double benefit of freeze-framing everyone in the kitchen, wolves and all, and proving without a doubt that He was very close indeed to his quarry.
“Ooooh, S’tan baby, You’re ssssssso hot,” He hissed, walking round the deathly still figures arranged like statues in a tableau of How Humans Used to Live Before S’tan Ran Things. “Hot, hot, HOT,” He gloated, bending over each figure in turn and sniffing for the unmistakable signs of who was most afraid.
The boy, he decided, stopping beside Titus, who’d just returned from the wine cellar when Time stopped. There he stood, a bottle of decidedly average champagne in each hand—the calculated insult wasn’t lost on S’tan, who there and then decided to make Titus pay big-time—his stupid face moon-pale, his T-shirt soaked with what S’tan assumed had to be the sweat of true terror.
“Perrrrfect,” S’tan purred, reaching out to poke two inquiring fingers into Titus’s unresisting mouth. This, He’d discovered, was by far the simplest way to establish a psychic connection with a victim. He delicately prodded the arched roof of Titus’s mouth until, with only a scant few fractions of an inch of bone separating His fingers from the meat of Titus’s brain, He felt the boy’s psyche open up like a flower. A quick trawl round his synapses and seconds later He had His answer.
…Something had gone wrong, he guessed, trying hard in the pitch darkness not to give way to panic. Like, one minute he’d been down in the wine cellar selecting the naffest fizz he could find…or had he? Was that part of the dream? Ever since the balloon and the weirdness of meeting a long-dead ancestor, Titus had felt as if he’d been sleepwalking. Now this, this darkness. It made his head hurt just thinking about it. Anyway, something had gone wrong, badly wrong, and now, without the faintest idea of how he’d got here, he found himself trapped…imprisoned in what felt like either a very small stone box or…an average-sized stone box. All right, say it. Not a box, a crypt; and yeah, not imprisoned but…buried. He was buried in what he suspected had to be the family crypt in Auchenlochtermuchty. And now he badly wanted to scream his head off, but he was all too aware that he had to conserve what little oxygen there was, in order to escape. But how? How had this happened to him? Whatever were his parents thinking of, dumping him in the crypt without taking the trouble to check if he was alive or not? I mean, that was a bit much. That’s like carelessness of a whole new order…or—the thought popped into his head—or perhaps they didn’t know he was here. Perhaps they were dead too?
NOOOOOOOOOOO.
Don’t go there. I really don’t want that thought anywhere near me right now.
Right, Titus. Get a grip. Concentrate. Engage boot-camp mode. Find whatever internal sergeant major/personal trainer you need to get you out of here. Do whatever it takes, but just d
o it. Knees drawn up against your stunningly weedy and underdeveloped pecs. Tighten abdominals. Just remember, this is going to be the toughest workout you’ve ever done, and don’t, repeat don’t, even think about giving up. You only need to move the lid of the crypt enough to let air in. At first. You can survive for a good long time if you have air. Without air…right. There’s another thought you don’t want anywhere within range. Go. C’mon, Titus. Go, Go, GO. Put your back into it. PUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHH.
And push he most certainly did. Veins bulged in his head and capillaries burst behind his eyes, and he could feel his clenched teeth creak…but he pushed his feet up and away, and after several increasingly desperate attempts, he was rewarded. A tiny slit appeared in the absolute blackness above. He felt the blessing of a chill draft, felt its touch on the sweat on his face, felt his skin cooling under its welcome caress. He lay gasping for air, still trapped but triumphant. Head pounding with what promised to be the mother of all monster headaches and legs like overcooked spaghetti, but hey…he was alive. Just as he was about to indulge in another moment of deserved self-congratulation—Way to go, Titus; what cool; what strength; what—
The dim crack of light was blotted out, and all of a sudden he understood that what he’d felt before wasn’t true fear, it had just been a rehearsal for when the real fear began. The crack reappeared, its silhouette reassuringly geometric, crisp, straight, and…oh God, there it was again, and this time he knew with total certainty what was about to happen. Knew before the first soft brush against his terrified, tortured face. Knew as, over and over and over again, the darkness came and went, as spider after spider dropped silently into the crypt beside him: thousands of them, wave upon wave, relentlessly dropping to their doom as he thrashed and screamed, crushing them beneath him…
…until there was no room left for thrashing, and soon no air to scream in…no—
“Neeeext.” S’tan retrieved His fingers and fastidiously wiped them on His filthy chef’s trousers, His nostrils flaring as He assessed whose fear he could best exploit. The father’s, or the daughter’s? He considered this, strutting round the kitchen table until He was level with where Luciano stood behind Strega-Nonna’s chair, frozen in the act of helping his aged relative to fold herself into a sitting position.
The father. Definitely. The man reeked of fear, despite his earlier performance as relaxed host and delighted brother to Don Ratface. Once more, S’tan’s fingers scrabbled and poked, forcing their way in, gate-crashing Luciano’s mouth. Again, the answer was almost immediate. Neither father nor son had any idea of what or where the Chronostone was. Peeved by this lack of results—after all, He was the finest of torturers and unaccustomed to anything other than one hundred percent success—He allowed His gaze to wander around the room. The old hag? Hardly. She looked as if one puff of wind would blow her apart. That only left the girl and the nanny.
A few deep sniffs told Him nothing. They both smelled of soap, not fear. Feeling vaguely uneasy, S’tan realized that there was something about the nanny that confused Him. He couldn’t put a finger on what exactly that something was, but as a general rule of thumb, He’d learned that things He didn’t understand or found confusing were always bad news. As He was coming to this conclusion, He was already prizing Pandora’s lips apart with His fingers, pressing down on her tongue and demanding entry to her thoughts. S’tan’s eyes widened in shock. What? He was actually meeting with resistance? Hard to credit, but this…this impudent squirt of a girl had the temerity to stand up to Him? Impressive? Well, yeah, but also most definitely not to be tolerated. S’tan brought His Chronostone-enhanced will crashing down on Pandora, battering her psychic barricades and clabbering at the locks, bolts, and drawbridges of her mind.
Somewhere deep down inside herself, Pandora fought back. Refusing to admit that this terrifying face-off with her uncle’s fat friend was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, she forced herself to dredge up a vivid memory out of her bank of Bad But Survivable Things I’d Rather Not Repeat. It came erupting up out of her subconscious like a bubble of marsh gas, but she clung to it as if it were a life raft.
When she was five years old, school had come as a most unwelcome shock. Plucked out of the cocoon of StregaSchloss and flung into the alien landscape of Auchenlochtermuchty Primary, she had been assured that school would be fun. After the muted monochrome of home, to be surrounded by so many dazzling colors was astonishing. Noise too: the roar of her fellow pupils; the clanging of bells telling them when to eat, when to play, and, eventually, when to go home; this too was so different from the relative hush of StregaSchloss that she found it thrilling. Collected by Luciano after her first day at school, Pandora had babbled happily all the way home, telling him about the thrilling clamor and the astonishing colors, and had fallen asleep later that night, happy in the discovery that school had been fun.
Where it had all gone catastrophically pear-shaped was that Pandora had mistakenly assumed that after one day spent in school, that was it. No more of that. Been there, done that. When Luciano delivered his red-faced, pink-eyed, and protesting daughter back to school the following day, she’d been inconsolable with grief at the prospect that the school thing was going to last for the next twelve years of her life. Luciano, practically in tears himself, was persuaded to go home, but couldn’t stop himself from turning round to catch a last glimpse of his little girl’s face pressed up against the window of the classroom, her eyes fixed accusingly on him, her mouth open in a downturned crescent of denial.
It remained fixed in Pandora’s memory as the worst day of her life. Not because of Dad’s betrayal, nor the semi-intentional thuggery of some of the nastier kids in her class: these were Bad Things, but far, far worse than these was finding out that some adults—one in particular—seemed to take great pleasure in making children utterly miserable. This grim discovery occurred in the dining hall. Standing in a straggly lunch queue, she wondered out loud what was causing the dreadful smell she’d noticed the minute she’d walked into the dining hall.
“’S like poo,” she confided to the little boy in the line behind her. “Smells like dragon poo,” she added, confident that she’d managed to nail down the source of the unwelcome pong.
“What did you say?” a voice demanded.
Pandora spun round, her smile fading as she realized that the adult towering over her was not amused; was in fact furious, if her pinched expression was anything to go by. Miss Clint, onetime traffic warden and now school dining hall supervisor, was a woman for whom the word bristly might have been invented. Pandora quailed, shrinking away from the advancing menace like a balloon before a hatpin.
“I, um, it smells like dragon poo, I said.” Pandora spoke so softly, it was doubtful whether Miss Clint heard, but that didn’t seem to matter. Before the little girl could say one more word, she found herself sitting at a table on her own in a corner of the dining room, peering in disbelief at the monstrously overloaded plate in front of her.
“But. Um. I hate cheese,” she explained, glaring at the gluey plateful of macaroni and cheese, which was emitting the odd wisp of sweaty-sock stench, like a slumbering volcano. Horrible, stinky cheese. She’d rather eat bees.
“And you’re not leaving the dining room till you’ve eaten every morsel,” Miss Clint advised through lips that hardly moved.
“But I’ll…but…I’LL BE SICK,” Pandora blurted out, hoping that this shameful truth would melt the woman’s heart and grant her an escape from death-by-ingestion-of-dairy. This was not to be.
Miss Clint folded in the middle, bending down to hiss in Pandora’s face: “Stop fussing. I’m prepared to wait for as long as it takes for you to do as you’re told and Clear Your Plate.” But it was the expression on the woman’s face, not the insanity of her words, that convinced Pandora that here was an adult who actually relished causing pain.
That had been a defining moment in Pandora’s life. For the first time ever, she realized that she was on her own. At
pickup time Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t know what had happened to her and would have to go back home without her. She’d never be allowed to go home again and would have to spend the rest of her life staring at a moldering plate of macaroni. Her fellow pupils were trying to pretend that they hadn’t witnessed the whole hideous exchange, and were looking away in case bad luck was contagious. When Miss Clint forced the first ghastly, disgusting, dragon-pooey, bad-socky forkful past her lips, Pandora had been utterly terrified.
But she still didn’t swallow. She locked eyes with Miss Clint, noting, even as she began to gag, that the dining hall supervisor was changing in front of her eyes: fattening out, sprouting even more bristles on her chin—or was she a he? His face was growing uglier, his eyes were turning red. Red? She barely had time to register this horror before the tines of the fork pressing against her tongue began to soften and swell, becoming once again the fingers of her uncle’s fat friend, and now the fear was almost overwhelming, coming in huge surging waves, battering at her, one after the other after the—
Now, dear, a voice said softly in her mind, you’ve done marvelously. We’re so proud of you. Do you think you could manage to do just one more wee thing?
Don’t ask me to swallow, Pandora begged, her eyes swiveling from side to side, trying to see where Mrs. McLachlan had sprung from, appearing as she had done in the middle of this nightmare like a very welcome gate-crasher.
