The Murdstone Trilogy (15 page)

First Cadrel, then the Sage emerge from the shadows of the cataract. Smiling grimly, Cadrel unsheathes Cwydd Harel. Keepskite turns back, then cringes against the rock face as Morl steps out onto the ledge. With an offhand gesture, Morl pinions Keepskite to the rock with mind-forged manacles. The prince and the necromancer gaze at each other with blazing eyes.

There then follows an exchange of compulsory Sword and Sorcery banter. Philip hurried through it.

After a final curse, Morl raises his arm and unleashes a massive charge of Hex at Cadrel; but the prince uprights Cwydd Harel in front of him and deflects the bolt. The deadly energy ricochets skywards, striking a cruising garfulture; the unfortunate bird is transmuted into a pig, which plummets, screaming, to its death on the rocks that rim the Tarn. However, so powerful is the strike of the Hex on the magickal sword that its shock renders Cadrel unconscious and he falls.

Morl aims his hand again to deliver the
coup de grâce
but reels back, howling, as every cell of his body is jiggled by a blast from GarBellon’s periaptic staff. By a tremendous act of will, the Dark Necromancer reconfigures himself and faces his Ancient Foe.

The Sage, age-old, straggle-bearded, his white robes besmirched and torn, looks no match for the still-athletic Antarch resplendent in his green and silver battle-gear; but Philip knew who he’d put his money on.

Pocket’s prose takes on tremendous pace and swing as he describes the final duel between Good and Evil. Murdstone now dimly remembers how furiously the inkage had writhed onto his monitor, how his fingers had jittered frantically over the keyboard transcribing it.

The battle is by turns physickal, metaphysickal, psychologickal and magickal. In one particularly vivid paragraph, the two wizards become a black alligator and a white crocodile locked in a savage embrace full of claws and teeth amid the teeming waters of the cataract.

‘Stone me,’ murmured Philip, ‘it’s Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. He’s nicked that. Can’t have, though …’

At last a roar of triumph sounds above the booming of the waterfall. And it is Morl who has prevailed, victorious but hideously changed. A terrible asymmetry has befallen him. He moves in a series of lurches, as though his legs are at odds with themselves. His once handsome face is disfigured; the left side of it is now puckered, silvery, scaly, like scar tissue grown over burned flesh. The eye that glares out of it is orange and lidless. His left shoulder is humped up close to his ear, of which only a vestigial stump remains, and his right hand has congealed into a set of hooked and leathery talons.

The triumphant smile which further distorts the necromancer’s face disappears when he realizes that he and Keepskite are alone on the ledge. Cadrel and Cwydd Harel have vanished, and with them the Amulet of Eneydos. Hissing with rage, Morl approaches the shackled and
gibbering troglodyte. His eyes blaze blue and orange. He extends his claw toward the Vednodian and utters the words of the Withering Cantrip; instantly, permanent night fills the orbs of Keepskite’s eyes and his testicles shrivel to pips.

Philip’s mouth was suddenly very dry. He scrolled down to the last half-page of the text.

Morl turns and hobbles across the ledge until he stands at the very edge of the precipice. He raises his unequal arms; for an instant it seems that he might launch himself suicidally into space. Then he lifts his face and howls a curse so dark, so savage, that its echoes form a black cyclone that gathers Morl into itself and roils away across the wilderness of Vedno.

The End.

Well. Philip hadn’t known what to expect of Pocket’s nobble, but it certainly hadn’t been this strangely disturbing hybrid.

It would do, though. Yes, by God. It would certainly do. Defeating expectancy wasn’t something that happened every day. Quite the opposite.

He could see the cover quotes now:

‘
Strangely disturbing
’ Victor Hireling, the
Sunday Times.

‘
Elegant, horripilant, perverse’
Dyana Kornbester,
NY Review of Books.

He sat staring at the screen for several minutes.

Then another thought came upon him like sunrise in a major key.

Pocket had ended
Warlocks Pale
with a cliffhanger – almost literally so. Morl deformed and crazed and whirled away. Cadrel in possession of the Amulet, presumably. GarBellon dead. (Or was he? No sight of a smashed and water-bloated corpse.) Nothing finally resolved.

So …

Go careful, Murdstone. Be delicate. Nothing so untrustworthy as hope.

But it was obvious. Undeniable.

He stood up and left the room and patrolled his cottage, touching walls and furniture as if for luck or reassurance.

Why
, though?

They’d done a square deal, eyes and bollocks in hazard, him and Pocket.

The Greme would give him a nobble, a flaky ledger. He would give the Greme the Amulet.

End of story.

Except that it wasn’t.

It was still unresolved.

There was
more
.

A third volume.

Had to be.

Why?

He was in the kitchen, staring at the electric kettle as though such a thing was inconceivable, never previously witnessed.

Because Pocket had got the bug.

He’d have no immunity against it, of course, being
the first of his kind that’d been exposed to it. Hadn’t known that once you start flaky ledgers there’s no stopping. That the desire for admiration – even from worlds you despise – becomes an addiction, once it’s granted. Becomes feverish when it’s removed.

Pocket would want, need, to go on.

The little bastard had become, unwittingly, innocently, due to force of circumstance, a nobblist.

Yes!

Philip was, he realized, acutely hungry. At that instant an ugly clamour rent the air: the cack-handed campanologists of Flemworthy’s bleak Victorian church summoning the sad and the elderly. So it must be Sunday. Damn! Then he remembered, joyously, that Denis had recently taken to opening the Gelder’s for weekend breakfasts. Philip found himself salivating at the thought of Denis’s version of the Full English: black pudding with sweet and sour pomegranate sauce, kedgeree with pineapple, and wild boar and mint sausages, all washed down with a pint of Guest Ale.

He returned to the study and copied
Warlocks Pale
onto a new memory stick, then clicked on Outlook Express. He typed MINERVA in the address box, wrote ‘Will this do???’ and attached the text. He waited for the Outbox to clear, then left.

He was halfway along the lane when a worrisome memory struck him.

Don’t you go rambly.

He returned to Downside and wrote ‘Starving. Gone to
the pub. Back in an hour. Thanks. Brilliant. PM’ on two sheets of paper. He put one on the floor of the lavatory and the other in front of the fireplace. Then he hastened unto his breakfast.

On his return, Philip discovered Pocket Wellfair standing motionless in the living room.

‘Pocket,’ he exclaimed, a touch too heartily. ‘My dear chap! I hope you haven’t been waiting long.’

‘Long enough.’

‘Have a seat, have a seat. Can I get you anything? Glass of water?’

‘I’m fair set as I am, thankee.’

It seemed to Philip that the Greme was a little out of sorts. The twinkle in the old eyes had dulled, and there was a hint of putty in the colour and texture of his face. On the other hand, he’d added a colourful accessory to his costume; a jaunty red and white kerchief was knotted around his neck. This Bohemian touch was encouraging. It strongly suggested that Pocket had recognized his literary calling and had decided to dress accordingly.

‘Listen, Pocket. The nobble is brilliant. Amazing.’

‘Twill do, will it?’

Philip nodded ironically, belched richly. ‘Yes, it’ll do.
You have an enormous talent, you know. Enormous. You’re a natural.’

‘That’d be a compliment, would it, among your lot?’

‘Absolutely. But listen, I have to ask you this – why on earth did you kill yourself off halfway through? It shocked me rigid.’

‘I didn’t kill meself. Some other bugger did.’

‘Well, yes, of course. In terms of the actual story. But I mean … well, as the narrator, the storyteller. Why you suddenly decided to become someone else. Use a different voice. Adopt a different point of view.’

The Greme stood with his head cocked slightly, as if listening to something faint and far away.

‘I got bored,’ he said finally. ‘And I’m getting bored again, with all this jibber-jabber. So, business, Murdstone. The Amulet.’

‘Sure, sure,’ Philip said amiably. He took off his jacket and undid the top two buttons of his shirt. Then he paused, and smiled, and said, ‘So, when are you planning to start the next one?’

‘What?’

‘The next book. The next flaky ledger. Nobble.’

‘What in a pig’s arse are you flabbering about now?’

‘Well, you obviously intend to write another one. I assume that’s why you left the last one unresolved. Unfinished. On the edge. To Be Continued. Hmm?’

Pocket Wellfair’s eyes narrowed. ‘I hope your head hasn’t come unlatched, Murdstone. I do hope and trust you’re not about to frolic me about again.’ He raised
his right hand and extended two fingers. ‘Cos if you do, I’ll send a wibbler up your jacksie that’ll turn your teeth upside down. Then I’ll do your eyeballs and empty your scrote.’

‘No, no. No frolicking, Pocket, I promise. The Amulet is yours, fair and square.’ Philip pulled it free of his shirt. The clerk’s eyes locked onto it. ‘It’s just that I thought … well, that you’d
want
to. Write the last part, you know. You should, Pocket. Honestly. You have a genius for it, and that is definitely not too strong a word.’

Wellfair said nothing.

Philip lifted the chain over his head and held the Amulet in his cupped hands, gazing at it like a widow about to scatter her husband’s ashes on a golf course. Then he lifted his face, which wore, he hoped, an expression that was both teasing and beseeching.

‘Come on, Pocket, my old friend. Let’s do another one. Finish the sequence. You know you want to. And it’s not a lot to ask, is it? It only took you a few days to do the last one.’

The Greme’s face twitched. A smile or a sneer or something in between.

‘Fluke me, Murdstone. You never give up, do you?’

‘The thing is, I really
need
another one. These things come in threes, you see? I don’t know why, they just do. Look, I know I’ve nothing to bargain with. I have to give you the Amulet. I know that. I’d be too frightened not to. But we’re friends, aren’t we? And, and, I found the Amulet. I looked after it for you.’

Pocket’s face hardened.

‘Please,
please
write me another one. Look, I understand how important the Amulet is to you. To Cadrel. To the Realm. Of course I do. I’m not frolicking about here, Pocket. But what you need to understand is that another book is just as important to me as the Amulet is to you. Really. It would save my life. All right, it is a lot to ask …’

Wellfair raised a pale and featureless hand, and Philip fell silent. He thought he could hear a faint humming in the room, like the tiny sound a light bulb makes just before it dies.

‘You’re a greedy little piddick, Murdstone.’

‘Yes. Yes, I am. But also
needy
, Pocket. I can only appeal to your better nature. Help me. Please.’

‘All right, all right. Fluke me.’

‘You mean you will? You’ll write me another nobble? Promise?’

‘Promise? You
ask
me
to promise, you backsliding arsewart?’

‘No, sorry, Pocket. Sorry. OK. That’s fine. Thank you. Thank you.’

‘Keep your thanks, Murdstone. They interest me less than a miretoad’s quim. Now get up off your imaginary bleddy knees and give me the Amulet.’

Philip held it out.

‘No, no. Dangle it by the chain. That’s a good pony. Now reach your arm out towards me, nice and steady.’

Philip did as he was told. At this long-awaited and
ceremonious moment he felt the need to lower his head in a gesture of solemnity.

Pocket approached slowly, murmuring words in the Old Language. When he was an arm’s reach away, Philip inhaled a little gasp. Where the chain lay across his fingers he experienced an icy tingling. The Amulet itself appeared to be vibrating, in that its edges became indistinct and then distinct again; yet it did not seem to be in motion. It increased slightly but discernibly in weight. He looked up.

‘Pocket …?’

The Greme had halted. His wide eyes were fixed on the Amulet. A spasm passed over his pallid face, as though a hundred tiny muscles had twitched beneath the surface of his skin. He licked his lips. The tip of his tongue was dark blue.

‘Pocket? What’s happening?’

The Greme seemed not to have heard him. His mouth twisted, struggling to utter words that would not come.

Now the Amulet moved. It rotated slowly through three hundred and sixty degrees and when it was facing Pocket once more the Greme shuddered and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, each had extruded a thick white tear that wriggled, rather than trickled, down his cheeks. Pocket put a hand to his face and wiped them away. They fell to the carpet. They looked like grains of rice until they started to move. Philip watched them with horrified fascination for a moment or two, then was distracted because the Amulet jerked on the end of its chain
and became so heavy that he had to use both hands to support it.

‘Pocket? What the fuck is happening?’

His voice died. More thick white tears were oozing from Wellfair’s eyes, eyes that were now darkening into black apertures. The Greme’s blue-tipped fingers wiped at them weakly. Those he managed to brush from his face fell and twitched on the floor. His mouth opened. It was full of maggots.

Philip’s scream blended with another sound, a sound something like a huge sigh of ecstasy, and the Amulet opened itself, hingeing apart like a tide-wakened mollusc. It sucked the light from the room and concentrated it into a blueish beam that focused mercilessly on Pocket.

Philip struggled, panicking, to let go of the damned thing, but could not. Nor could he speak. Nor take his eyes from Pocket.

Who was decomposing. The Greme’s head went back and his mouth gargled a final imprecation that sprayed pale pupae into the air. The neckerchief fell from his melting throat revealing, momentarily, a seething diagonal slash. The pale flesh of his long fingers dissolved into squirming gobbets that dripped to the floor. Then the clothes collapsed, affording Philip glimpses of bone and slackening sinew before the sticky white swarm consumed them.

Then Pocket was gone.

The Amulet drew its blue force back into itself and closed with a muted hiccup.

Philip was now alone in his living room with a vast colony of larvae. He could hear them. They were murmuring, seeking each other, having hectic miniature discussions, forming themselves into groups. Groups that formed larger groups. Piling themselves into shapes. Building something. The air in the room was now a faecal, gangrenous stench. Whimpering, Philip climbed onto the sofa and crouched at the end furthest from the nightmare. He clutched the Amulet with the fingers of both hands, holding it in front of him, without knowing why, yet completely unable to let go of it.

At tremendous speed, the millions of maggots formed themselves into a mound with three increasingly distinct sections. Their squirming surfaces hardened and darkened into a glistening carapace. Long tendrils emerged then thickened into jointed legs, blackened, grew claws, sprouted bristles. Two legs were deformed. Next, with a sound like Velcro parting, big wet buds burst from the thing’s back and grew into hard transparent wings stretched on black metallic spars. The head swelled into being: two huge multifaceted bubbles above hirsute, gluey mouth-parts. One of these eyes glittered. The other resembled a diseased grapefruit.

The maggots that had assumed the necromantic form of Pocket Wellfair had become a giant bluebottle that smelled of shit and ammonia.

Complete, the creature was motionless for a moment or two. Then its legs adjusted position, tilting the grotesque head slightly downwards. From the end of its
proboscis, the fly extruded its labella, a flat hairy tongue the size of a cow’s. It drooled necrotic saliva onto the carpet. Apparently not finding what it sought, the fly turned itself, using brisk movements of its thorny legs, in Philip’s direction.

Philip wanted to scramble behind the sofa, but found himself mesmerized and peculiarly listless. He could not tell if it was his soul or his breakfast that threatened to rise into his mouth. The giant tongue slathered across the floor towards him and climbed onto the sofa. It settled on Philip’s shoe, ensliming it, then moved, in sticky paroxysms, up towards the meat of his leg.

The Amulet bucked, sighed, opened. Its intense blue radiance coated the fly in flickering light, just for an instant. The monster recoiled and toppled away sideways, its legs flailing, its gross abdomen convulsing. Its immense and frenzied buzzing set the entire cottage vibrating, rattled the windows in their frames.

This shockwave of sound shook Philip from his trance. ‘Die, you fucker!’ he screamed. ‘Die!’

Heartfelt though it was, his wish had the opposite effect. In a fast sequence of spastic motions, the fly righted itself. It stood twitching slightly, silent now, a thick thread of mucus hanging from its complex jaws. Then, briskly as before, it turned towards the sofa once again. Philip thrust the Amulet out towards the giant insect, but there was no blast of light.

He shook it urgently. ‘Come on, come on!’

Nothing.

‘Oh, please, bloody please!’

The fly advanced.

Then stopped.

Philip, paralytic with dread, found himself gazing into its bulbous eyes. Myriad disfigured faces of Morl Morlbrand looked back at him.

The fly spoke. ‘Lower the Amulet, Murdstone. It will not destroy me here, outside the Realm.’

The voice was a thousand voices gnarled into one. The night-voice of some limitless forest. It was sonorous, and – considering that it emanated from a fly so recently swatted by a million-volt blast of Magick – oddly self-assured.

Philip did not, could not, move.

‘I enjoy fear, Murdstone. Especially when it is pure. Distilled. Uncontaminated. Is that what I would savour if I were to lick the sweat from your face? Or would I get the bitter aftertaste that traces of hope leave on the palate?’

‘Don’t touch me. Please. Leave me alone. You can have the Amulet. Really. I don’t want it.’

The Morl-fly lowered itself, as though relaxing. ‘No? Then why don’t you just reach out and drop it in front of me? Go on. Then all your troubles will be over. Go on.’

He couldn’t do it. His fingers were locked onto the Amulet, and when he tried to push it away it resisted with a force far greater than the strength of his arms.

The fly laughed stickily. ‘You thought, did you not,
that you were in possession of the Amulet. As in all things, you were wrong.
It
possesses
you
. Believe me, it would have been better for you had I relieved you of it. Unfortunately for both of us, I miscalculated. I thought I had plumbed and reconfigured its ancient enchantment. Now I find I yet have work to do. Further depths to mine. Lakes of deeper darkness to angle in.’

Despite the terror that had disabled his normal bodily processes, Philip thought he recognized something familiar in the necromancer’s diction, the somewhat scholarly syntax.

‘Doubt not that I will succeed, Murdstone. Nothing remains that can stop me; not even Death, with whom, as you have seen, I have reached a certain accommodation. So to speak.’ Another oleaginous chortle.

‘All I wanted was a fucking
story
,’ Philip cried.

‘No, Murdstone. You wanted
my
story. And that is a somewhat different matter, as you will discover.’

The phone rang.

Abruptly, the fly contracted its tongue into its chitinous channel and turned away like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons. The legs made another series of angular movements, their claws audibly finding new purchase on the carpet. Philip shrank back, but the fly swung away from him towards the fireplace.

‘I regret I must curtail this conversation. Time does not keep well, frozen, even in the Thule.
Adieu
, Murdstone. I shall be back. I have your coordinates now. That’s a little crumb of certainty for you. You may find it of some
comfort, I dare say, now that the limits of your world have melted. But I, at least, can be depended upon.’

The fly crawled into the fireplace and angled its body upwards. Its front legs found claw-holds in the blackened chimney-throat. Then, with a good deal of thorny scrabbling, it climbed up and out of sight.