The Murdstone Trilogy (13 page)

Philip shouldered open the door to his cottage and almost died of shock because there was a blackened mannequin sitting in his fireplace. Without taking his eyes off it he sidled into the kitchen and with a thief’s cautiousness placed his bags on the counter. He extracted a bottle of Highland Park from its festive tube and took a slug straight from the neck, and then another.

He closed his eyes while he shuddered and kept them closed as he felt his way back to the door into the living room. When he opened them the mannequin was still there. Its legs were splayed, one of them slightly bent. A rustic coronet of dirty twigs sat askew on its head, which was resting against one of the fireplace’s granite flanks. It appeared to have no eyes. There was a good deal of soot fanned onto the hearth rug, and granules of it drifted in the light beams from the window like a descending cloud of midges.

Philip realized that the Amulet had become cool and passive against his chest, but was so fascinated by what he was looking at that his anger and grief lasted only a
moment. He crept across the room until he was within touching distance of the small and filthy corpse. The only thing moving on it was a reddish trickle coming from a wound on the forehead; it oozed down, gathering black grains like magma seeping from a tiny volcano. He was stooping to examine it more closely when the thing opened its eyes.

Eyes that he knew only too well.

It spoke. ‘Murdstone?’

‘
Pocket?
’

‘Murdstone.’

‘Pocket!’

‘We could go on like this all bleddy day.’ A pale tongue appeared and cleaned soot from lips. ‘Me going
Murdstone
, you going
Pocket
. Still got water?’

‘Yes,’ Philip said. ‘Shall I get you some?’

‘No. I was only asking out of polite bleddy interest. Fluke me, Murdstone.’

Philip went to the kitchen and filled a glass from the tap, then grabbed up the whisky and brought both back to the fireplace.

The Greme drank, gargled, spat.

‘You’ve hurt your head,’ Philip said.

‘Not as bad as you’ve hurt it, you piddick. Never mind it. Comes of getting your shitter mixed up with your chimbley. Whoa. Ought to be a saying, that. I might slip it into the ledger.’ Wellfair drained the glass and set it down in a small soot-dune. ‘I see you still got the Amulet lashed to yerself.’

Philip took two steps back.

The Greme lifted a limp black hand. ‘Ease up, ease up. Don’t get your clouts up your crack. I’ll not be trying the rough stuff. Bruised as a charity apple I was, after the last time. No, there’ll be none of that.’

‘Promise?’

‘On my Old Dame’s bollix. Solemn, that is.’

‘Right. OK, then. Do you want a hand up?’

‘No, I’m fair set as I am, thankee. I don’t expect to be here long. So. How’s tricks, Murdstone? The Amulet coughed up the rest of your nobble, then?’

‘What?’

‘You know,’ the Greme said, casually aiming a filthy thumb in the general direction of Philip’s study. ‘The Great Work. Wondered how it was comin’ on.’

Philip stared, speechless for several seconds; then all his weeks of frustration and misery and bitterness formed a ripe boil and burst.

‘You, you … fucking little … You think this is
funny
, do you? It’s a bloody laugh, is it, keeping me up there going through ten thousand silent hells a bloody hour for what feels like a fucking year? That’s what passes for comedy, is it, in those stinking little bloody burrows of yours? Keeping some poor sod on the hook, torturing him, pulling him up, dragging him down, seeing how much he can take? You
bastard
. And, and, and then you, you just
materialize
in my fireplace and take the piss? How’s
tricks
, Murdstone? How’s the
nobble
? When you
know
there’s no bloody nobble because you haven’t, you
won’t …
give
it to me, you – you sadistic little fucking gnome! All right, all
right
! I can’t take any more. Is that what you want to hear?’

Pocket Wellfair sat in his soot, immobile and silent, for the whole of this soliloquy and for some little time after. Then, thoughtfully, he murmured, ‘So. Hum-de-hum and doodle-dee,’ and looked over at Philip, who had slumped onto the sofa, snuffling. ‘Right. Done? Now then, sit up straightish, there’s a good pony. There’s a thing I have to do.’

He raised his left hand and released a charge that for one second converted the contents of Philip’s lymphatic system into formic acid. Savaged by internal ants, Philip screamed and sloshed Highland Park onto his lap.

‘Pardon begged for that little wibbler, Murdstone. You called me a gnome, see, and so I had to. Ordained Comeback, Cantle Two of the Greme Code. Can’t frolic with anything in Cantle Two. Stings a bit, I expect. Drew that snot back up your nosehole, though, didn’t it? You have another swig of your damage there, and you’ll be right as a trivet.’

Philip drank, then sat glaring sullenly.

Pocket hitched himself more upright, wincing a little.

‘So then, down to business. Cos, appearances contrariwise or otherwise, this is not a social call. Now, you listen up, Murdstone, and oblige me by not chipping in with your usual Whats and Whys and Wherefores. Since our last little misunderstanding, which, surprise bleddy surprise, earned me an Ache as would bring your arsecheeks
up to your collar, certain things have come about.’

He cleared his throat importantly.

‘Which are as follows. After ferking back and forth and mumblin and jumblin for about a bleddy moonpassage, Scholar Volenap finally agrees to call a Clear Table Colligation of all the surviving Readers.’

Here Pocket paused to allow the enormous significance of this to sink in.

‘First one for over seven Circuits. Sod of a pig to organize it was, what with the scatter and most of our Lines bollixed by Swelts. Bleddy risky an all, as even you can imagine. Despite of which, most of ’em made it. First matter arising, of course, is the fact we haven’t got a Clear Table.’

‘I know,’ Philip said. ‘It was lost during the—’

Wellfair’s icy glance silenced him.

‘So we had to use a door set atop of my truckle. There’s a mighty flapdoodle about that, naturally, and so there has to be a whole flukin day of Abjurations and Revouchments and Solemn this and Solemn the other, before we can even get down to the rabbit. Naggled me to the wick, I can tell you. Anyways up, to trim the fat off the tale – and a bleddy fat tale it was, Murdstone, some of them frowsty old wrinklers think even their farts is High Rhetoric, make Volenap sound sharp as a tree-pecker – we did come to a Clear Resolution.’

Pocket paused again, to let the weighty phrase settle.

‘Want to know what it was, Murdstone?’

‘Er, yes. Yes, of course.’

‘I should think so. So, the Clear Resolution was that I, Pocket Wellfair, do write a flaky ledger. Being the first time such a thing has ever been attempted in the annals of the Realm. What you think of them parsnips, Murdstone?’

‘Flaky ledger? You mean a novel?’

‘Indeed I do. A nobble.’

‘Right. And, er …’

‘And I have done one? Ho yes. Settled the inkage about, lessee, two hours back, in your money.’

‘Christ, Pocket, that’s … I mean, is it …?’

‘Any good?’ The Greme blew soot from his fingertips and admired his nails. ‘Well, ’tis like judging cats in the dark, for me, of course. But I’d say it’d do.’

Philip was trembling now, and took a shot to steady himself. ‘And are you going to, I mean, is it, will you …?’

‘Give it to you? Course I will. No bleddy use to me, is it?’

Philip put his bottle down carefully on the sofa beside him and covered his face with his hands. He made small plaintive noises.

‘Well, in a pig’s arse, Murdstone. I reckoned you’d be pleased.’

When Philip uncovered his face it was wet with tears. ‘Oh, God, I am, I
am
! You’ve no idea … Thank you, Pocket, thank you, thank, you, thank you. I can’t tell you what this … You’ve no … Oh, God.’

‘Fluke me, Murdstone. No need to carry on like a tupped granny.’

Philip collected himself. ‘When can I have it? Today? Tomorrow?’

Wellfair raised a hand. ‘Rein up, rein up. Whoa. There’s more.’

‘More? There’s more?’

‘Ho yes. Cos the Clear Resolution comes with a Clear Pendicle.’

‘Pendicle?’

‘Yes, Pendicle. What you might call a, bogger, what’s your word …?’

Philip knew. ‘Condition?’

‘That’s the badger. Condition. Which is, that in exchange for the prescribed nobble, the Oath of the Four Orbs sworn between Pocket Wellfair and one
Murd
stone be renewed.’

‘Ah.’

‘Well may you bleddy
Ah
, Murdstone, cos this time there’ll be no wrigglemalarkey. You go wormy on me again and there’ll be no demanding Render, not even the once. I’ll have your peepers and seeders out afore you can say Fork. Got me?’

Philip nodded. ‘Yes. All right.’

The Greme squinted at him suspiciously. ‘You agreed to that a bit sharpish.’

‘Well, I don’t have much choice, do I? My deadline is three weeks away.’

‘Deadline? What you mean, deadline? You look all right to me, Murdstone. Apart from that twat thatch of a beard.’

‘No, what I mean is, I have to finish, have, the book, the nobble, in three weeks. No, before three weeks have … passed.’

‘Three weeks? That’s, er, lemme work this out … Bogger, that’s more than plenty. Took me less’n half that.’

‘My God. Is that true?’

‘Well, I was in a bleddy hurry, wasn’t I? Now then, where was I? Right. We’ll do the deal in a minute. Afore that, though, tell me this, and no flammery. That flyshit inkage of yours, up there on that wordtapper thing. What you was writing last time I came through and we had our little disagreement. Did you do what I told you? Did you do Wake and Banish on it?’

‘Did I do what?’

‘Did you’ – Wellfair fluttered his hands impatiently – ‘make it go back where it came from?’

‘No,’ Philip admitted.

‘I thought as much, you scrotewart. You don’t know what’s good for you, do you, Murdstone?’

‘I don’t know
how
to make it go back where it came from,’ Philip said defensively.

The Greme squinted at him. ‘What, you sit there without any say in it? No wiping the slate clean?’

‘Well, I can delete it. Is that what you mean? Go back to white paper? I can do that, yes.’

‘Thank the Knob for that. Thought we were back in the slurry there. Right, then. So here’s what you do, and don’t you bollix this up, hear me? You go up there – no,
not now, not now, you piddick – and you delite all that hagwrit. All of it, mind. Not a bleddy word remaining, and I mean it. Give me your oath on that, Murdstone. Not that your oath’s worth the steam off a rat’s piss.’

‘I promise. Honestly.’

Pocket cocked an eye. ‘You naggle my wits, Murdstone. We spent untold amounts of time looking for you. The man for the job, we reckoned. Thought you’d know how dangerous ledgers are, let alone flaky ones. Turns out you’ve got no flukin idea. None of you do, to be fair. All just mumble and money. But it’s come to this. Everything depending on a human nobblist. Buggers belief, don’t it?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Philip said. ‘Everything just got a bit out of hand. But I’m sure it’ll be all right in the end. It usually is.’

The clerk laughed sootily. ‘Well, we’ll see. So, let’s get on. You know what to do. Fingers on your eyeballs, that’s it, and your other hand on your … No, no,
inside
your britches. I want to be sure you’ve got ’em cupped snug. Right. Here we go, then.’

Wellfair recited the Oath of the Four Vital Orbs, enunciating Philip’s surname with pedantic exaggeration. The room dimmed while he spoke. Then the Greme reached into his coat, took out the blue egg and rotated its upper part a quarter-turn. He put the egg away again, and fixed his owlish eyes on Philip’s face.

‘So,’ he said. ‘We’re done, and this time we’re square-done. Don’t you make a bumscumble of this,
Murd
stone,
cos if you do I’ll drag you to damnation by the back legs, and that’s solemn.’

‘OK.’

‘So you go up there and delite that shite. Then at, lessee, give me … Well, at what you call ten o’clock, I’ll start to send you my flaky ledger, pardon begged,
nobble
. Same as before. And when you’ve got it all, I’ll be back for the Amulet. Can’t say exactly when, so don’t you go rambly. Got that?’

‘Yes. Fine. OK. Ten o’clock.’

Pocket sat silently contemplating his amanuensis for a second or two. It seemed that he was about to say something further, but then, to Philip’s considerable alarm, the great granite blocks of the fireplace seemed to sag and flex and the Greme was gone. The updraught of his passing hoovered soot from the rug and the hearth so that when the stonework had resolidified the fireplace was as clean as a baby’s conscience. Only the empty water glass remained.

Cautiously, Philip went to peer up the chimney’s black throat. Seeing nothing more than a patch of lesser darkness, he picked up the glass and poured whisky into it, shakily.

Later, he discovered that one of the Kwik Mart bags contained a vacuum-packed chunk of industrial Cheddar and a plastic tub of coleslaw. He chewed his way stolidly through the food, even though the salad had been dressed with a gluey and bubbly substance rather like a chain-smoker’s sputum. The same bag also yielded up a jar of instant coffee and a bag of white sugar.

He took his cup across the lane to the gateway and watched the onset of dusk. His heartbeat was a pendulum that swung between unbearable eagerness and intolerable anxiety. To fill in time he returned to the cottage and attacked his beard with kitchen scissors, but when he tried to shave with the blunt razor the pain was too much for him. He washed the soap away and the mirror showed him that the lower part of his face resembled a guinea pig that had narrowly survived a savaging by a Labrador. He took a bath and put on fresh clothes. He drank some more whisky. By eight thirty he was so stressed that he was forced to run on the spot to avoid hyperventilating. This made him dizzy and he had to sit down.

Sitting down was impossible, so he went to the kitchen, filled an empty bottle with water, then carried it and the remains of the Highland Park, plus two glasses, upstairs. He settled these supplies next to his keyboard, drew the curtains closed and lit the lamp. From the malodorous heap of discarded clothes in the bathroom he retrieved the belt and tethered the Amulet tight to his breast. He was not sure if this was any longer necessary – strange that Pocket had said nothing on the subject – but he could leave nothing to chance. He sat down, took a deep breath, opened the file labelled
Murdstone 2
and began reading.

Hagwrit, Pocket had called it. What else? Misbegot something-or-other. But it was so bloody
good
. Rich and bitter as quality chocolate. After twenty pages he put his elbows onto the desk and propped his head in his hands. After thirty seconds in this position he found himself quite literally paralysed by indecision. He could not so much as blink. The grey cubes of his keyboard magnified under his gaze, loomed up towards him. He began to feel a kind of vertigo, a fear that he might topple into the bottomless chasm between Y, U, H and J.

How could he delete all this? It would be an act of literary vandalism, apart from anything else. Maybe he could just sort of round it off somehow, publish it as a novella. Ward off the hunger pains of his impatient and voracious readership, that innumerable host of waiting mouths. Get Gorgon off his back. It would be worth a million. No, more. Much more. It would be criminal to
erase it. He couldn’t do it.

And if he didn’t, what? Would Pocket refuse to send the nobble? Probably. Almost certainly. He’d been serious. Deadly serious.

But would he
know
? Gremes knew nothing about computers, obviously. So if the text were hidden somewhere on the hard drive, innocuously labelled … or, no, copied onto a CD or that stick thing. Sealed and buried in the garden. A bank vault. Then delete it from the computer. Dare he risk it? Oh, God.

Philip knew that he didn’t know what Pocket knew.
How
he knew things. Was the Greme, in some unimaginable way,
watching
?

And on top of all that, there was the question that he only now allowed himself to contemplate: what if Pocket’s story was crap?

The first time in the history of the Realm anyone had written a flaky ledger, the smug little bugger had said. There was, therefore, a huge chance that it would be a load of mimsy old toss. Looked at coolly, the likelihood of Wellfair producing a finely wrought work of imaginative fiction was … well, it was like expecting Leon and Edgar to entertain the Gelder’s with a duet from
La Traviata
. And to gamble on that possibility half a masterpiece would have to be sacrificed. It was so
unfair
! To impose such a choice on someone who had already suffered so much …

It was cruel. Inhuman.

He pulled his eyes out of the alphabetical canyon and
saw that the time was nine forty-five. Christ on a bike, how had that happened? On the verge of panic, he lowered his spiritual bucket into the deep well of himself and it came up slopping fear. A moan, a long bovine sound, came with it.

He tapped Ctrl A and the screen turned nasty, the superb text now sad yellow script on a black graveyard slab. His right index figured hovered, trembling, above the Delete key.

Tap.

Gone.

The Amulet shuddered against his breast.

A howl of pain or rage. It came, Philip assumed, from his own throat.

He closed the file, said Yes to Save Changes, opened a new document.

Nine minutes passed, during which he grieved bitterly. At three minutes to ten he drank a large shot of Scotch, tightened the belt a little and sat straighter in the chair, waiting for the Amulet to awaken.

It didn’t, but at a minute past ten he began to hear something similar to wind stirring fallen leaves. It was not coming from outside. It was in the room. Rhythmic and deeply pleasant. He quickly entered a state of profound but clear-headed relaxation. Now someone was walking through the leaves, feet making a dry slushing noise. The monitor screen faded and wavered, then steadied itself, brighter than before. At the same instant the susurration in the leaves resolved itself into nibscratch and Pocket’s
inkage began its slithery unfurling across the bottom of the screen. Of their own volition, Philip’s fingers spread themselves over the keyboard and translated. He flicked his eyes sideways: the visuals were there. Yes!

A huge and sallow moon rising over water. Something moving slowly into shot. A barge with a night-black sail. GarBellon, grim-faced, wrapped in his cloak, at the tiller. By the dim light of the barge’s hooded lamp, Philip could see a mantled figure. Mesmira?

Yes: his fingers danced her name.

She sat at the prow, her head lowered over the figure – Cadrel? Yes, by God! – whose head lay in her lap. Blood seeping through the joints in his armour. His eyes bandaged.

Just before the critical faculties of his brain shut down, Philip was filled with the joyous realization that everything was going to be all right. Pocket had come up with the goods. It was brilliant. It was what everybody wanted.
Murdstone 2.

Yes!

Then he entered trance.

Was lost to himself.

Until – there was no way of knowing how much time had passed – there was a brief but terrifying break in transmission. The unravelling inkage paused, then went into reverse, undoing itself and melting away. Philip’s fingers typed a few words backwards before coming to a halt. He stared numbly at the screen, trying to remain enwrapt in his hypnogogic trance.

Then the monitor went dead.

He heard owlhoot. It roused the worm of panic that slumbered in his descending colon. He began to rise out of the depths of his inspired catalepsy like a hooked fish. The hook was in his chest.

The Amulet! It trembled, grew cold as an ice cube against his sternum.

The screen blipped on and off again.

He thought or said, ‘Wait, Pocket, for God’s sake,’ and took his hands off the keys and tightened the belt.

Cold turned hot.

He was filled with black light like a swoon. The screen flashed on again, became a mosaic then a kaleidoscope then cleared. Inkage swarmed up the page again.

His hands flew to the keys.

What?

What?

Who?

Always the man for the questions, Murdstone.

Then he plunged again. Became the dumb conduit. The laid fuse waiting to carry Pocket’s flowering fire to its powder keg. More or less unconscious.

Under his dreaming gaze his fingers swarmed like fish over the reef of his keyboard.

When it came to its end he was a husk, an oyster shucked and sucked from its shell.

After a while he came to and remembered who and what he was.

The screen glimmered at him and he realized he hadn’t saved the text. He hastily clicked the Save As tag. Only then did he realize that Pocket hadn’t thought to give his nobble a title. Not knowing what he had written, and exhausted, Philip simply couldn’t face the task of thinking of one. Anything would do for now. His eye fell upon a row of ale bottles ranged along the narrow shelf above the narrow bed.
Tanglefoot
. No.
Abbot’s Digit.
No.
Doom Bar
. Hmm …
Warlock’s Pale
. Yeah. Good enough. He tapped the words into the File Name box, omitting the apostrophe. Saved. With considerable effort he swung the chair until it was facing the bed. It was both a short distance and a hundred miles away. Somehow he got onto it.

He dreamed that he was in an open-plan office of measureless proportions. It was night, and nobody was there. Away in the distance a single desk lamp burned, so he headed towards it. Long before he got there, the lamp went out.

He awoke in the same dream, except that the space was much smaller and the desk lamp was his own. It was still night. Or it was night again. He felt OK, but jittery. He made himself go downstairs in search of food and drink. The light in the kitchen was incredibly harsh. He put the kettle on to boil, and found the remainder of the cheese, grooved by his teeth. He ate it with difficulty, then made instant coffee and carried it back up to the
study. He sat in front of the computer and stared for a few moments at the ethereal beauty of the Taj Mahal. He added a slug of whisky to the coffee and wished he’d bought cigarettes. He reopened
Warlocks Pale
and read for six hours, frequently using the mousewheel to back-scroll the text, trying to fix the shape of Pocket’s narrative in his head. When the words
Part the Second
– he had a vague memory of being alarmed by them – appeared on the screen he sat back in his chair and inhaled moistly through his nose.

He was deeply moved.

He also needed a break.

He went to the lavatory and emptied his bladder, then went downstairs and dragged open his front door. The cool lambent air hit him like an angel’s cocaine; he felt pneumatic with hope, joy, confidence. It was, apparently, dawn. Perfect dawn.

He let out a little cry of delight and scurried out onto the lane. Despite the rigours of the past how many hours, he felt dew-fresh and new-hatched.

He stood at the iron gate and watched the new day ripen the landscape. Night’s last lingering indigo yielded to peach. He could almost hear the bracken unfurl, the gorse crackle open its spicy yellow blossom. Off to his left, a pony snickered.

Philip smiled ruefully, recalling his doubts. Pocket’s nobble was, so far, excellent. He had not expected the Greme to manage so adroitly the tricky balancing of continuity and suspense. Nor to understand the human
need for stories to have meaning. To force shapelessness into shape. Pocket had achieved that, of course, in
Dark Entropy
; but that was non-fiction. Sort of. Presumably. But to have built this extraordinary edifice … well, who’d have thought the little bugger was that sophisticated?

As in
Dark Entropy
, Pocket’s eccentric first-person narrative alternated with passages of half-timbered prose from the Ledgers. Which he’d had to invent. He was ideally qualified to do so, of course, having been a Full Clerk. All the same, it was bloody clever. And, unlike the aborted misbegotten text, light and dark were delicately balanced. The passage in which Mesmira gently and gradually bathes Cadrel’s eyes in the colour-gradated waters of Lemspa; Cadrel seeing, after weeks, his reflection in each of Mesmira’s eyes: wonderfully done, without any indulgence in sentimentality.

Then there was all that darkly comical stuff about the whatweretheycalled, Vednodians. Philip was pretty sure that they were Pocket’s own creation. There was no mention in
Dark Entropy
of Vedno, a remote region of the Realm characterized by uncharted vales and gloomy moors, loomed over by glowering crags. Nor of its community of stoned and hirsute troglodytes whose chief aim in life was to imbibe the hallucinatory waters of Zydor and lose themselves in day-long dreams of heroism and sensuality. Philip, while no fan of comedy, could appreciate the black humour in these episodes. As yet, though, he was unclear as to what part they played in the overall schema, which concerned itself, of course, with the search,
the battles of might and will, for the Amulet of Eneydos.

He was beginning to suspect that Keepskite, the singularly disgusting Guardian of the Font of Zydor, might be in unwitting possession of the Amulet. The hints in the text that this was the case were very subtle. So subtle, in fact, that perhaps the only reader able to spot them would be Philip himself. He smiled at the thought. Cunning old Pocket.

These pleasant ruminations were disturbed by a flurry of bleats. A frisky mob of lambs, already abattoir-plump, capered into view, shepherded by their groaning mothers. Emerging from his reverie, Philip was struck by the thought that Pocket, having fulfilled his part of the bargain, might be turning up any moment to demand Render of the Amulet. He might even now be materializing in the fireplace or lavatory. It suddenly seemed terribly important to finish the reading of
Warlocks Pale
before that happened. So he turned away and hastened back unto his cottage.