Maxie’s Demon (4 page)

T
HE
VILLAGE
STREET
was a misnomer. You’ve heard of getting into a rut; this was it. In places it was still a path, well trodden and pebble-strewn, meandering away between banks of scrubby grass. Maybe two or three cottages on each side, a few grubby sheds, a couple of farmhouses set well back along even narrower paths.

None of your honeysuckle-round-the-door perfuming
the evening air; more like faulty drains. Or no drains at all.

So
this
is Broadway!

At the little crossroads the other streets looked just exactly the same. Handy; saves all that stressful decision-making. It was dusk, but none of the windows were lit; they were probably all in the pub. It did occur to me I might slip in and snap up the odd essential to speed me on my way, but these yokels probably
still clapped people in the stocks or the ducking-stool or something. Besides, did I really want some guy’s best moleskin leggings? No, the sooner I was out of here the better.

I
hurried over the crossroads and on, stubbing my unprotected toes on stones and swearing, and found the path beginning to slope upward through a narrow dell. This countryside didn’t go in much for hills, but there seemed
to be a rolling stretch beginning here, with what looked like grazing fields behind solid hedges – nice to look at but murder to dodge through. I glanced back hurriedly to see if I was being followed, but the only citizen in sight was a vaguely female form beating the hell out of something in a cottage vegetable patch.

I shivered. I could empathise with weeds; nobody wanted me either. Ahwaz wouldn’t,
not now I’d blown his biggest single profit this year. Neither would his competitors. So I’d have to find some other scam; but where would I start? The sun rolled down behind a hill, and darkness wrapped itself around me as I walked.

I hobbled up the path, spurning unseen pebbles lurking among the grass tussocks. It hurt, it was getting bloody cold and my feet skidded on the half-frozen mud,
but I told myself I didn’t care. I was set on getting out of this den of acculturated lunatics and back into the real world I’d just about learned to cope with, even if they couldn’t. The high bank on either side, crowned with a rickety rail fence, bulked higher as I approached the rim of the dell, turning the path into a sharp V against the stars. I plodded on, shivering in my jacket. At least my
knees weren’t aching so badly now; they were numb with cold.

A star – a planet, rather – gleamed golden at the brow. I fixed my eye on that as a guide, tripping now and again over the tussocks and the hardness of the world. Tiredness gave me tunnel vision; it was a little while before I realised that the banks had sunk down again, and I was over the brow. My guide glistened in a vast chilly dome
of blue and silver, cloudless and moonless, floored with deep velvet. It was achingly beautiful, and for a moment it held me, not cursing, not caring, not thinking at all, simply drinking it in with the clean air. It was clean, too; it smelt. …

I
didn’t know what it smelt like. Inhaling starlight, maybe, needles of it, jagged edges, fire in my lungs; I coughed. It sounded strangely loud, weirdly
so, and the darkness swallowed it once it was gone. The chill drove through me, painfully. I thought of the warm fug of a heated car, and looked hungrily around for the road.

I couldn’t see it; and I couldn’t hear it. Yet I could hear my own soft, rasping breath, desperately loud. There was nothing else, not even the faint background hum that haunts you when you’re sitting awake in the small
hours, waiting bleakly for the wrong kind of knock on the door. This was madness, this was utter bloody lunacy. They were all around us, the roads. I’d seen them with my own two eyes. I’d dropped off one, for God’s sake. I ought to see that same approach ramp looming against the distance now, all three tiers of it, and the grotty concrete landscape that always goes with the things, studded with little
token greenery patches and half-dead shrubbery. I could hardly help hearing it; in the field I’d heard it, in the village – there was nothing wrong with my hearing.

That
was right. There was nothing. Nothing between the stars and the velvet but a path, two fences and in the middle me. Trees were painted silhouettes around the dome’s base, infinitely distant, mere shapes with no solidity. There
were no lights of any kind, still or speeding, chained or single. There was nothing except what the stars threw down. There was too much nothing, it became an unbearable pressure. Sheer emptiness pinned me down and stared at me, an insect on a card. It bowed my spine like a ton weight. There was only my breathing, and that was in little short gasps now, and each breath blew a little more of my last
warmth out into the nothing, which drank it up. Nothing, and it was wrong.

Almost as if it answered the thought, suddenly there was something. Light blinked, a faint, fragmented gleam through lacing foliage, and one clump of the painted trees sprang into shape and nearness. Not that near, though; and there wasn’t a bloody thing comforting about it. It was close to the ground, but not at it; and
it was completely still. It might be an upper window, not very large; but it was pale, maybe greenish. There was no warmth in that lonely gleam; the stars seemed warmer, and by being there it only stressed what was missing. This was no world of mine.

The village felt warm and normal by comparison. I didn’t know what or where this was, I wasn’t even going to wonder about it. I was going to turn
right back and walk down between the little houses, not even warm myself at the inn but keep on straight back to the junction and take my chances there.

Warm
myself? I hadn’t been that cold. I’d crashed into a field of ripe grain, being harvested – a bit early in the year, maybe. It had been a warm evening, with masses of fleecy cloud; it couldn’t have turned to this, not so quickly. This was
the bleak midwinter, like the carol said, and if frost wasn’t making moan it was just drawing a deep breath. I was plain terrified; I wasn’t going to walk back, I was going to run like hell. Only before I could turn, I heard it.

It was from the field next to me, a little way behind. It wasn’t a human cry, that much I was sure of and no more. If it wasn’t human it had to be animal – didn’t it?
But there I wasn’t so sure. High-pitched and hungry, it turned me to an animal myself, hunched and frozen like a rabbit caught in the headlamp beam. But I shook off the paralysis with a single convulsive shudder; then, bruises or no, I was over the further fence in a vault and pumping legs across the barren soil with my breath sobbing in my ears.

A vixen’s cry is a shocking thing. I’d heard one,
late at night, on a moonless country lane. It had made me jump; it didn’t make me run. This wasn’t it. This one left me no choice; it gave me a sharp jab right in the basic instincts. And it was somewhere down the slope, between me and the village.

The boot slapped into the sewer; the rat leaped and ran like – well, like me. My ruined jacket squeaked with the effort as my elbows pumped, close
to my sides, keeping my balance, wasting no energy, my knees lifting high. I’d been on the school team, but as a distance runner, and this was a sprint, a merciless thing with God knew what on my traces any second. At least I was light-footed enough so my shoes didn’t break the frozen crust. I’d been running for a good few minutes before I registered where. I was heading for that light, because it
was the only thing to head for; it looked a lot nearer now, but not that much more reassuring, still pallid, still greenish.

I ran
headlong into the shadow of the trees, and hung crucified on a hawthorn bush. This is about as comfortable as bonking on barbed wire, but all I could do was hang there and gasp. Then I heard that cry again, only much, much closer. Flailing and panting, I tore myself
free, ripping more off my jacket and my hide. Blood ran down my face, twigs tangled irremovably in my hair. Then I was past, pushing through the trees and heading for the house they half concealed.

In good repair and a good light it might have looked better – well, quaint, maybe. But even in the starlight you could see the mangy-looking gaps in the thatch, the flaking half-timbering and the crumbling
walls with the wattles standing out like bones in a corpse. It had me peering around for the gingerbread oven.

There were no lights at all in the lower windows; they were heavily shuttered, and the door tight shut. It had an old-fashioned garden-gate type of latch, the kind you can open with a penknife, or a reasonably stiff potato chip for that matter. I tested it gingerly, but it didn’t lift.
The light came from the upper floor, from a smallish window just below the eaves. It was escaping through a half-closed shutter, it wavered as if people were passing and repassing before it. Somehow it didn’t occur to me to knock, at least not at first; but I had to get off the ground, and fast. So, up and let’s have a look, then maybe I might risk introducing myself.

There were no drainpipes,
but there was a low, shingle-roofed outhouse with a water butt to one side, and I could reach the sill from there. The butt moaned and creaked under me, and something parted with a little flurry of dust, but I was on the roof in seconds, and inching along towards the window. I couldn’t see through the casement, though; I’d have to get on to the actual sill itself, and that was narrow. I’d known
cat burglars who’d taught me a thing or two and said I should try it; but like the old man always said, never buy into a falling market.

Still, I was
only going to look, wasn’t I? And it wasn’t that far up, and there were bushes to land in. Gingerly I plastered myself to the grimy wall and stretched out a toe. Just as well I didn’t have big feet. No sweat; the wood was firm as a doorstep. I took
the weight, reached out to snatch the side of the aperture and pulled myself across on shaky fingers. I stood a minute, breathing fast, then very slowly peered around the edge. I could have saved the caution; the mildewed casement wasn’t glazed. Its panes were small patches of some thin, streaky plastic, brownish, whitish – mostly opaque. I touched it, and realised it was horn, ground very thin
– transparent in places. There was one I could get my eye to, so I leaned that bit further, trying not to breathe too hard.

I sighed
gratefully. The light in there was peculiar, but I could see through, in a misty sort of way. Just people. I don’t know what else I’d been expecting, but that cry gave you all sorts of ideas. They might even be sane, who knows?

Mind you, I wouldn’t have given you
odds. The older of the two citizens, the one I could see quite clearly, looked like something you trip over at Grateful Dead disinterments – sorry, revivals. All hair and beard and kaftan, very white, tall and thin – clearly a casualty of Woodstock, or walking wounded, anyhow. The other one had his back to me, but you could tell he was younger, rough-haired, shortish and muscular, with tension
in his stance. His hand crooked like a knob-legged spider on the pages of a large book, poised on some kind of lectern. They were both bent over, peering at the floor as if somebody’d dropped a contact lens. The old hippie was prodding at the floor with a long, thin stick.

After a moment I realised they were bobbing, in time to something, a chant maybe. I felt a terrible urge to start clucking
and scattering grain. Their shadows against the walls exaggerated the movement grotesquely; shadows that showed the light was coming from between them, from the floor. It was green, all right – very green, to show through the dense panes like that, and very bright. If I stretched up to that other transparent bit—

The wood cracked with an explosive pop. My foot skidded. My balance went, and emptiness
yawned at my back. I scrabbled at the side, at the pane. Mildew and slime threw off my clutching fingers. Logically I should have just turned a fall into a jump, aiming for the bushes, but at that kind of moment logic is generally in the corridor smoking a cigarette. Fighting for balance I lurched forward, then lost it again and toppled headfirst against the casement.

It gave and
exploded inward.
I went straight through it with a howl of raw panic and claws of horn and wood scraping at my face and hands, clipped a stack of books and landed in a sort of obscene crouch slap in the middle of the floor. The books toppled, and the table beneath them collapsed in a flurrying snowstorm of paper scraps. I hit something hot; it fell with a clang, green fire streaked along the floor and the most
godawful stench hit me. The green light went out, and the room was suddenly black, except for fire-dancing shadows. The old fellow reared up and let out the most amazing screech.

‘The daemon! The daemon!’

I heard a door flung back and feet go rattling down a stair, punctuated by screeches. I tried to stand up and instead found myself nose to nose with the other man, gibbering and scrabbling
on the floor.

‘What the hell—’ I snarled, and he let out an even worse scream, with a burst of bad breath to boot.

‘
Hell?
Oh no, no, most merciful daemon, I do avouch thee no, I am not worthy the taking, I’m but a miserable, misled sinner led astray by men of more schooling and wisdom to speed the satisfaction of their greed for treasure in the search for which we did seek indeed to raise a
spirit but would not for the world have disturbed thee—’

About the middle
of this stream of apologetic gibberish I became aware that all was not well at my back; to be precise, I was getting more than a little hot. And where was that firelight coming from? And the stench—

My turn to scream, and who wouldn’t? I was on fire, my torn jacket was smouldering and singeing my hair. I sprang up, scrabbling
at it, bashed my head on a rafter and came down all over said citizen. He broke the local scream record and shot out from underneath me, headfirst down the stairs by the sound of it. I was too busy rolling on the boards trying to put the flame out, and by the time I’d managed it there was only the sound of somebody shrieking in the distance – about half a mile away, I guessed, which meant
he was putting up a good speed. Serve the stupid bastard right.