Maxie’s Demon (34 page)

The Rabbi smiled, hefting what looked like an
earthenware tablet in his hand. ‘
Idem.
I also am surprised. But it underlines, does it not, the truth of what our young friend claims?’

‘It does,’ admitted Dee sadly. ‘The sooner Master Maxie is freed of this, the better. Who knows what next may manifest itself through him?’

I stared. ‘Hold on – what’s this
through me
stuff?’

The Rabbi
blinked. ‘Were you not aware of it? But of course, you
would not see so clearly as I did. The grass, the trees – you were the source of that demon’s wind, my son. From whatever shadows it was summoned, it blew through you. There is enough of them in you to be its conduit. Well, I must not linger here. I have preparations of my own to make.’

‘Guard yourself as well as Master Maxie,’ said Dee unhappily. ‘If … what you suspect be true, there may be
more to fear, and as much from man’s hand as beyond nature.’ I began to protest, but he shook his head firmly. ‘Hold you here upon this spot now, young sir! Upon your peril do not move, or speak, or do aught without I command you.’

Dee carefully smoothed out his brocade strips and cloths, retrieved the bowl cover and began relighting the bowls, this time without incident. The Rabbi, with an amiable
nod to us, retreated to the edge of the trees, and kneeling down among the stones, he began to trace figures of his own on the ground. I could just hear him singing under his breath, a high, keening sound that suggested things eastern. Dee, meanwhile, had begun to stride around the circle with his staff held in one hand, pointing to each smoky bowl in turn and chanting, bowing slowly and deeply
now. It was Latin, I realised, as my ears grew used to the sound – very slow and sonorous. I caught about one word in three, but enough to know it wasn’t ordinary book-Latin – probably what they called monastic, with a style and a vocabulary of its own, the sort that survived in church services, plainchant, that kind of thing. At first the Rabbi’s nasal singsong made a daft sort of obligato to
Dee’s rolling grandeur, but after a few minutes that seemed to fade away, and when I glanced around he was wandering off, leaving only his scratchings in the turf.

It was cold and it was boring, and I was beginning to want a leak rather seriously. Dee droned on, and I didn’t dare interrupt him. And then, after a while, I began to realise that the wind was back; only this time it was blowing from
a definite direction, across the city from the east, and in the last faint glow of the sunken sun black clouds were riding it. Ragged hag-tatters, they raced together, trailing thin veils of misty drizzle around the spiky spires, and advanced upon the hill. The gusts flicked nastily at Dee’s robes, and whistled their way under my coat and into all my remaining nooks of warmth. I stamped and swore
– under my breath, in case it got into Dee’s spell.

It was as if
I’d aroused a sleeping beast. Underneath my foot the ground heaved and sent me staggering, almost to the circle’s edge. The bushes rattled their dry stems warningly, and the grass in the dell convulsed, not in windrows now but in great pulsating shivers that shook the earth and sent stones rattling. Voices groaned under the ground,
moans of tortured stone. I stumbled this way and that, struggling to keep my feet; but though puffs of chalk were jolted from the circle’s rim, nothing moved inside. Dee and his bowls and table stood firm, while his words rolled out into the whipping air.

The rain came and went in brief, fierce flurries. One moment there were the steep city roof peaks, gleaming blackly in the last low rays, then
a grey wing beat across our eyes with stinging force and everything vanished. Within the cloud lights moved, faint marsh-gas glows leaping overhead from side to side, and long, shimmering shadows that loomed up like grotesque stiltwalkers and were instantly gone, and the rain after them, spattering and trickling off the drenched leaves. It had become hard to breathe, suddenly, and I panted. Dee
never missed a word, that I could hear. There was an instant’s lull, and then another gust, a worse one, with a howl that could have come from an open mouth. The ground still shuddered, not all at once but suddenly, just as you relaxed, and I heard stones tumble from the ruined walls.

Then the rain
seemed to lift, literally, like a curtain. I found myself looking up at Edward Kelley. He was standing
on the top of the walls, wrapped in the green robe he had lent me; but across his shoulder ran a broad sash of some fine material, painted, like Dee’s cloth, with signs in squares. Across his other shoulder lay something heavy and grey, a sack maybe; and he too carried a staff, a great cudgel-headed thing with a band of yellow metal about it. His face was a grim mask, expressionless as I’d
first seen it, but even his stance showed me the fury that burst inside him as he saw me.

He was fast, as always. In one brutal wrench he hauled the heavy mass from his shoulder and swung it high above his head, with a sweep of his burly arm that set it spinning; and then, like a sling, he let it go. Out into the air it sailed, and as it flew it spun and opened out like some kind of jellyfish.
Down over my head it settled, and with the last of its momentum whirled me off my feet. I fell sprawling, clawing and scrabbling at the imprisoning thing. It hardly seemed substantial, yet it bit into my fingers and wouldn’t tear. It was a net, gauze-fine but made of silk, I guessed, with weights around the rim so it could be flung like a bolo.

But why? I’d be out of it in half a second.

It
was then I saw the markings painted on it, and realised why it was circular. The border, the triangles, the characters – the same as that bloody table. He’d trapped me right in the centre of a Hexagram; and abruptly the air was full of green light.

I
screamed and struggled with the entangling threads, but they clung tight around me, sucking down against my face with every breath. Dimly I saw
Kelley spring down from his perch and stride towards me over the heaving ground, staff outstretched.

‘Redidendum est!’
he screamed.
‘In loco sacrificium sacrificatus est! Venite, venite, potentissime, recipite, redone, refulgete!’

‘Help!’
I disagreed. Something like that, anyway. The silk billowed above me, and suddenly that ring of faces was leering down at me again, all too familiar – the
dark-eyed women, the moustached Oriental, the crag-faced pirate type, the black guy and the rest. Now, though, their faces were all I could see, hanging in the brightening glare. With every pulse of it they changed, shifting and blurring into goggling gargoyle caricatures of themselves, eyes rolling, mouths working as one. The livid lips smirked back over dripping teeth no longer human, no longer
animal even, jagged, filthy, terrifying things. Out of those gaping, bodiless throats came the same cold cry that had terrified me that night in the empty fields, hungry, dismal, devouring. Around me they spun, the wailing faces, faster and faster into a dizzying blur. I threshed against the net, but it was useless. Above me stood Kelley, straddling me with his staff upraised, crowing deep in his
throat.

‘Refulgete! Redite! Unto your true master!’

The staff swept down.

And flew
apart. It broke like a rotten stick against the massive hand that thrust into its path. Kelley screamed hoarsely as it clutched the scruff of his robe and lifted him screaming from the ground. The blur tightened and dwindled in an instant, shooting back and shrinking into an infinite glaring distance – or depth.
Then with colliding suddenness there was darkness, hot and shimmery, and deep within it a glare erupted, shifting from sickly green to boiling crimson and back again. The eyes of my nightmare flicked open.

Now for the first time their raging light was so strong it lit up the rest of that face more clearly, hairy, bestial, with an outthrust wolfish muzzle and licking, slavering tongue. Yet beneath
that scanty pelt the outlines of the writhing features held a deeper horror still, for they were a nightmare compound of shapes half dissolved yet still recognisable.

Later, when the nightmares came back, I remembered Arcimboldo’s portrait, and the other one, the secret one Kelley had seen; and I wondered just where he’d been getting his ideas.

Those slanting
eyes were made of women’s bodies,
naked, twisted into cruel arcs; the light blazed out through their milky skin. The nose, the cheekbones were the bent bodies of men. It was their pale flesh that formed the face before me, their billowing hair that pelt. No part of that face that was not made up of them, splayed and tormented into unlikely shapes; and, worst of all, there were suggestions, a stray arm here, a half-hidden curve of
thigh filling a gap elsewhere, that there were other figures hidden beneath. They writhed, like fretful sleepers, and the expression changed. The snout lifted in a triumphant leer, a tongue lolled out that was a woman’s body, barely recognisable under the wash of slime. The steaming jaws spread wide to devour me.

Thud.

A massive toeless foot stamped on the net an inch from my head. Another huge
hand closed over its edge. A deafening howl of rage echoed between earth and sky, but the hand plucked up the net with an effortless ripping force that shot me right out of it and spun me over in the wet grass.

I didn’t mind. I was laughing hysterically. I managed to stop, though, tilting my aching head back into the coolness. I looked up at Kelley, kicking frantically some eight feet in the
twilit air, as immovably clamped as I had been. The net lay crumpled and torn at my side, and the vision had gone with it. Thunder crackled in the distance, and blue flickers lit the clouds.

‘Thanks, Adam,’ I said. And the damn thing ducked its head, as if to say, ‘You’re welcome, I’m sure.’

I don’t remember
very much for the next few minutes. When my head cleared I was on the ground still,
but sitting up, with the rasp of cheap spirit on my tongue. Rabbi Loew was looking at me and nodding sympathetically; while behind him Dee and Kelley were exchanging words. Pretty hard ones, too. When an insistently calm man gets angry, he doesn’t know how to handle it. Dee was weeping and shouting simultaneously, and shaking his fist in his brother’s face, when he wasn’t spraying it with saliva.
Kelley, his head down between his shoulders like a bull about to charge, was roaring and bunching his free fist as if to thump the Doctor; but every time he raised his fist the huge hand jerked him back by his other arm, ignoring his streams of profanity.

‘So you’re back with the living, eh?’ demanded the Rabbi.

‘Sort of,’ I admitted grudgingly. ‘Oh God. God, that was close, wasn’t it?’

‘Some.
He had assistance, some very low sorts of hireling, and it took a moment for Adam to deal with them. They are sleeping peacefully back there on the hill; and I do not think anyone need trouble to awake them again, unless it be this forgiving Nazarene of yours.’

A few spots of rain were falling again, more gently. I swigged greedily at the stuff – peach brandy, maybe. ‘And – is that it?’

The
Rabbi considered. ‘Most likely it is. They are not destroyed, those creatures; that would take a greater strength than mine, far greater. But, yes, the link is broken, certainly. They cannot now tempt you with their power, nor stretch their arms out to pursue you. Here you are barred to them. And once back in your own time how shall they ever find you again? Here, drink some more of this. Then we
must part your Brothers –
Adam
!’

Dee had
actually socked Kelley a beauty, right in the eye. I cheered. Before Adam could grab him he landed another, with his staff this time, on Kelley’s unprotected head, and a fine follow-through to the nose. Adam caught his free hand and stood there like a gigantic nanny with two squalling toddlers.

Rabbi Loew’s quick glance to heaven summed it all up. ‘Do
you feel well enough to walk? I would have Adam carry you, but—’ He shrugged. ‘In any event we must leave before the rain comes, and with discretion. There has been enough light on this hill already to attract the attention of His Majesty’s guard. Not to mention his witchfinders.’

There was a fresh outbreak of snarling. ‘Compose yourself, gentlemen! Or must you be tied into your saddles against
our return?’ He left them dangling and went to tidy up his own paraphernalia. After a moment I did my shaky best to pack up Dee’s for him. He was silent now, head hanging, utterly despondent.

‘I shall leave this place,’ he said. ‘Leave, and in shame. If all my researches have been follies—’

‘Oh no you don’t!’ snarled Kelley. ‘His pissant Majesty isn’t going to let you, believe me! You’re going
to stay – and you’re going to help me, you hear?’

‘Oh no he isn’t!’ I said, and I relished it with every fibre of my being. This bastard had strained most of them, anyway. ‘He’s finished with you. In fact, you scabby son of a bitch, we’re all fucking finished with you, and you are completely washed up. The wipe. The cleaners. The workover. Two rinses and the bloody starch! Zat clear?’

Man, I
was
enjoying this. ‘The Doctor and I are going back to the city. And he’s going to show me all the way home again – aren’t you, Doc?’

Dee nodded silently, still hanging his head. ‘Right!’ I crowed. ‘And
you
are going back with Adam and the Rabbi here, and if you’re very, very good he’s going to turn you loose somewhere along the way. Outside the walls, of course, and if you know what’s good for
you, you won’t try and get back in. That’s the only deal on the table, and you can thank the Rabbi on your bended knees. If it were me pushing Adam’s buttons he’d just put you down right here and sit on you, but then I’m not religious.’

‘You get of a spavined sow!’ snarled Kelley. ‘Had you not come crashing your way in—’

‘You’d have been in my shoes, sure. And you’d have deserved it. Believe
me, nobody’s ever done you a bigger favour.’

Kelley snarled something pretty remarkable.

‘Have it your own way,’ I told him. ‘Next time I smell a sewer, baby, I’ll think of you.’

And so we parted, for the moment. Give Dee his due, he bowed to the Rabbi, properly, and made a nice little speech. Loew went equally solemn on him, made just as nice a speech, then cheerfully ruined the effect with
a little
mazel tov
gesture to me. Then off he went into the gathering rain, with the clay giant shaking the hillside at his heels, Kelley tucked neatly under its arm. We headed back to our horses, with Dee still shaking his head and sighing.