Doctor Illuminatus (13 page)

“You saw this?” Sebastian asked, almost incredulously. “Right there on the shelf. You know about it?” “
The Ordinall of Alchimy
was written in the year of Our Lord 1477, the author an alchemist called Thomas Norton of Bristol. Did you open it?”

“I wanted to look at it, but the old man running the stall refused. Smelly old bloke!”

Tim closed the dishwasher door.

“What did you say?” Sebastian said.

“I wanted to, but the book —”

“No, not the book. The man. You said he smelled.” “Like a tandoori fart,” Tim chuckled.

Sebastian stood up, immediately agitated.

“This was no old man. This was de Loudéac.”

Pip felt her spine crawl, just as it had done that first night in Rawne Barton when she discovered the bats flying out of the eaves of the roof. It occurred to her now that perhaps they had not been bats at all, but de Loudéac’s minions reconnoitering the place, or leaving it, driven out by the arrival of her and her family after a decade of living there unmolested.

“How do you know?” Tim said. “He was just an old bloke selling some crappy books, who needed a bath.”

“He is known also by another name. Malodor.” “Malodor?” Pip echoed.

“They called him this in Gloucester’s household,” Sebastian explained. “Malodor. It is from the French
mal odeur
. A bad smell. The smell of evil.”

“So he shape-shifted into an old man?” Tim asked. “No,” Sebastian answered quietly. “What you saw was him.”

It was now Tim’s turn to feel edgy. He had stood right next to de Loudéac, talked to him and, worse, talked back to him.

“I shall go to the town immediately,” Sebastian announced, “to see if I might locate him, but shall return before nightfall. Please thank your mother for my repast.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Tim offered. “I know where the stall is and what he looks like.”

“No,” Sebastian answered bluntly. “This I shall do.” And with that, he was gone.

By early that afternoon, the river level had dropped. After the rain, the trout would be feeding well, for the warm sunlight would be bringing out a fresh hatch of mayflies. Tim picked up his fly rod and walked across the meadow to the river.

Determining not to go upstream from the Garden of Eden, he chose a section of deep water and began to cast out into it. As he often did when he went fishing, he worked the water thoroughly, casting in a pattern until he found where the fish were, but his mind was on other things.

His meeting with de Loudéac had unnerved him. It was one thing for Pip to be chased by insects, but quite another for him, albeit unwittingly, to be in the close proximity of a man who, by all accounts, was in league with Satan himself. He could not get rid of the image of the scrawny, gnarled hand raised as if to strike him, could not forget those words —
I’ll rip your bloody ears off
.

No adult had ever spoken to him like that, threatened him like that. It had been as if, for a few moments, the rules by which civilized people lived had been discarded, and it scared him. His world, Tim thought, was so safe, so ordered. He was, he realized, lucky to live in a comfortable home, to be the child of loving parents. Now, this man — this creature — had entered into that world and put it in jeopardy. Worse, there was nothing he could do except trust to luck. And Sebastian.

It was, Tim considered, incredible how a boy of his own age could come to terms and battle with such malevolence. Admittedly, Sebastian possessed his father’s knowledge, not to mention a bag of tricks that any television magician would have drawn his own molars out with a monkey wrench to attain, yet it still remained that he put himself at risk just for a principle, just for the sake of fighting evil.

His reverie was broken by a shout.

“Hey! Lad!”

Tim looked up. Coming along the bank towards him, from the direction of the Garden of Eden, was a middle-aged man wearing green wellington boots, a waxed waistcoat over a checked shirt and a cloth cap into the brim of which were stuck a number of gaudy trout and salmon flies. He was carrying a long walking stick like a shepherd’s crook, with a hook made of a deer’s antler at the top.

“Who are you, son?”

“Tim Ledger,” Tim replied, reeling his line in. “Do you have permission to fish here?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Tim replied. “My father owns this field and the next, up as far as the fallen bridge. We’ve just moved into Rawne Barton.”

“So you’re the new family. That’s all right, then,” the man responded. “I’m the water bailiff for the Cromer Arms, the pub on the road to Stockwold. They own the fishing rights on both banks as far as your stretch. Their beat ends at the ruined bridge. This time of year, we have to keep an eye out for poachers. The days are long and the salmon are on the run.” He grinned in a friendly fashion. “Do you have your Water Board fishing license?”

“I think so,” Tim said, and he lowered his rod and landing net to the grass. Reaching into his pocket, he took out the small aluminium tin in which he kept his flies. He had put his license under the foam padding for safekeeping. Opening the lid, he removed it. “Here it is.”

As he reached out to hand over the sheet of folded paper, the breeze shifted. For the briefest of moments, Tim caught the slightest whiff of a farmyard — rotting straw, cow dung.

“Thank you, son,” said the bailiff, hooking his walking stick over his arm, taking the license and unfolding it.

Tim put the fly box back in his pocket, bent down and picked up his rod and net. He waited until the man was reading the license and then, taking a deep breath, spun round and took to his heels as fast as he could go. He seemed to be leaping over the field, his steps gargantuan, spurred on and made large by his fear.

“Oi! You!” a voice shouted from behind him.

Yet Tim did not care. He sped on. If the bailiff had a problem, he could come to the house and sort it out with his father. This was his land, he did own the fishing rights and the license was up to date. He had not broken the law.

Something appeared over his shoulder. Tim caught sight of it out of the corner of his eye. It was the crook on the top of the walking stick, angled to snare him by the neck. He ducked and kept going, his body almost falling forward under the momentum of his running.

It was then it hit him. First, the air around him went liquid as if a bomb blast were running through it. This was followed by a hot, nauseous wind that scorched the nape of his neck as if, quite suddenly, he were being sunburned. A second later, he was struck by a sound such as he had never heard: neither a shout nor a scream, neither a yell nor a bellow. It was all of these rolled into one. And more. It filled his head, searing it through with the most terrible pain. It was like having toothache in his brain. Tim dropped his fishing tackle and instinctively put his hands to his ears. In vain. The sound seemed to be rising through him, as if from the ground, running in shock waves along his arteries, curdling his blood. He could not breathe.

His flight was reduced to a stagger. He was not sure now in which direction he was going. He opened his eyes to get his bearings. Ahead of him, across the field, was the river. To his alarm, he realized he was now heading towards it.

Standing on the bank was the bailiff. He was now at least four meters tall, almost the height of the riverside willows. The walking stick had grown as well. It was three meters long, the hook as big as that of a dockside crane. The bailiff’s legs were astride, his hands on his hips, his arms akimbo and his head thrust forward. Wide open, his mouth was a round black hole in the bottom of his face which was puce, his eyes staring, his brow furrowed with effort. Tim could see his lips rimming yellowed fangs.

Gradually, as he watched it, the mouth closed and the volume of the sound lowered. As it did so, the bailiff grew smaller. Finally, the sound was gone — and the bailiff too.

His head ringing, Tim collected his fishing tackle and stumbled towards the house. What he wanted most of all now was a full dose of aspirin. Yet, by the time he reached the ha-ha, his head was clear once more.

“He has the shout,” Sebastian announced, when Tim finished recounting his experience.

“What shout?” Pip asked.

“There are men,” Sebastian explained, “who have learnt the shout. Have you ever heard the story of Joshua?”

“Sure!” Tim said. “He brought down the walls of Jericho with his trumpet. It’s in the Bible. But what’s that got to do with a shout?”

“Sound vibrates,” Pip declared. “We did it in science. If you get the vibrations just right you can agitate the atoms of something so much that it breaks up.”

“I remember,” Tim replied. “Like that ultrasonic gizmo the dentist uses to get the plaque off your teeth. But descaling a set of incisors is a far cry from knocking down the walls of a Middle Eastern city by blowing a bugle.”

“It is only a matter of scale, Tim,” Sebastian said. “It is thought that Joshua brought down the walls of Jericho not by literally blowing his horn, but by using this to command his army to march in step round the city. The pounding of their feet in unison set up vibrations that loosened the mud bricks of the ramparts, which collapsed. It was told that Hector, the Trojan, had the shout and that the warriors of Ireland drove back their Viking enemies by screaming at them. De Loudéac has this power. And it is terrible, for his is a devil shout. If you had stood close, it would have killed you.”

Tim felt the blood drain from his face. He had been scared stiff of the bailiff-that-wasn’t, yet he had not considered that the man had been out to actually kill him.

“Now he’s going after both of us,” Pip said glumly. “He attacked Tim to scare him off,” Sebastian stated, “yet I am more concerned with why he has been attacking you, Pip. I feel you may have something he desires.”

It was Pip’s turn to blanch.

“What do you mean?”

“In Tim’s case,” Sebastian said, “de Loudéac drove him away. With you, he has taken something — a strand of your hair.”

“And a drop of your blood,” Tim added.

“What?” Sebastian snapped.

“It was the day we moved in,” Pip recounted. “I was stung by what I was sure was a butterfly.”

“But butterflies don’t bite,” Tim interjected. “Indeed not,” Sebastian agreed. “Describe it to me.” “Sort of browny and uninteresting,” Pip recalled. “With a yellow spot?” Sebastian asked.

“Yes,” Pip said, terrified. She felt like someone being told they had contracted a terrible disease. She wanted to make light of the news, perhaps prove it wrong. “It did suck my blood,” she admitted, “but only a tiny amount, for just a second.”

“This is most serious,” Sebastian replied. “De Loudéac is using you.”

“Using me?” Pip could not stop her voice wavering with sudden fear. “For what?”

Sebastian ignored her question and said, “De Loudéac believes we are getting closer to him. Tell me, Tim, exactly where did he shout at you?”

“On the riverbank, maybe a hundred meters downstream from the Garden of Eden.”

“From which direction did he come?”

Tim thought for a moment and answered, “He came from upstream. He said the pub’s fishing ended where there used to be a bridge.”

Sebastian considered these facts for a moment, then said, “He must be in the immediate vicinity.”

“If that’s so,” Tim said, “we’d better warn the Moonbeamers.”

“The Moonbeamers?” Sebastian repeated.

“The hippies. They call themselves the Moon-beamers. There’s half a dozen of them living in the quarry.”

“What sort of people are these?” Sebastian asked. “Drop-outs,” Tim said. “Dope-heads. Travelers.” “They’re sort of gypsies,” Pip intervened. “I suppose in your day they were like tinkers.”

“I know of hippies,” Sebastian said. “I mean, are they good people or are they bad?”

“They smoke pot and do their own thing,” Tim went on, “live an alternative lifestyle. The crappy old vehicles they drive usually don’t have a registration or an inspection. But I don’t suppose they’re bad. Not really, like, evil.”

“Then we must indeed go there,” Sebastian said urgently, “and warn them. They are in great danger.”

“Was there a quarry here when your father was alive?” Tim asked as they hurried across the meadow, passing the Garden of Eden.

“Yes, yet it was but small. I have heard told that it was started by the Romans who used the stone to build several villas hereabouts. In my father’s day, stone was cut there for the building of houses in Brampton. Later, in the reign of Mad King George, much more stone was taken, hence the quarry’s size today.”

“And the bridge?” Pip asked.

“That was also made of stone from the quarry. It was built some time before my father came, for it was here when Rawne Barton was built. It was used to bring stone for the house. My father was permitted to charge a toll to those crossing it.”

Tim stopped dead in his tracks.

“Look!” He pointed ahead. “The hippies must’ve got their act together.”

Between the old stone piers of the bridge, two long thick planks of wood spanned the river, bound together in the center by a length of blue plastic rope.

“Really helpful of them,” Pip remarked sarcastically, “giving the bailiff — de Loudéac — a way over the river like that.” She looked across the makeshift bridge. “It’s at least ten meters over to the other bank and,” she added, her voice betraying more than a hint of reluctance, “five meters above the water. There’s no way I can go over those planks. I don’t like heights and they’re no wider than a book.”

“Our passage will be quite safe,” Sebastian assured her, and, grinning mischievously, he took their hands.

Pip and Tim felt slightly light-headed, then found themselves on the top of the stone pier on the opposite bank. Behind them, the plank was undulating slightly.

“Have we just walked over that?” Pip asked disbelievingly.

“All you need to have is control of your mind,” Sebastian said bluntly. “Or,” he added with a smirk, “pass that control to another.”

They took the path up through the trees where Tim had followed Splice. Just before reaching the clearing beneath the old quarry face, Sebastian halted and closed his eyes.