The Printer's Devil (20 page)

Inside the circles were some figures and letters inscribed, and around their circumferences he wrote many strange words; maybe they all were names, I did see among them
Raphael, Seraphim;
then outside the circles he placed litten candles and inscribed more figures around them. After this he made a triangle and wrote a word on each of the three sides;
Tetragrammaton
and
Anephezaton
were two of these; I do not recall the third, although I think it began with the letter
P
.

-This is where she will appear, he said.

Finally he made another Solomon’s-circle about himself; so we were disposed thus, myself in the centre of the room facing to the east where the portrait stood, with the triangle between it and myself, some two-foot from the outside of my circle; Catherine to my left and Roger upon my right. And the magic hung so thick in th’aire I was like to be ill with the sweetness on’t.

^II
Slowly, slowly, let Night’s horses run slowly (
The words of Marlowe’s Faustus as he waits for the devil to claim his soul.
)

-Well now, all’s prepared, he said when all these preparations were completed. Now what we must do is this: Fabian do you look in the glass and think on her, as you did th’other time; and Catherine twill be best an you pray in silence. When the creature doth appear within the triangle I shall summon an angel to banish her.

-You said that she was no demon, said I; wherefore then this talk of an opposing angel?
Aquila non capit muscas.
⁸

-But angels do concern themselves with lesser powers in the canon of evil, replied Roger; therefore I must summon the most strongest power of good that I can, lest her power be greater than we know. And some whit of this argument did seem passing strange to me, but I had not the leisure to pursue it.

-Are you ready, Fabian?

-Ay, so much as I shall ever be, I replied, and took up the glass for a second time, my neck a-prickle with magic.

In the depths of the glass clouds roiled and raced, as a wild storm did impel them to break in rags and flee away; I called into my mind the images of Roger’s creature, from the unseen move-ments in vitro, in the glass-womb wherein she did grow, to the night-robed child-woman (child
she
never was), to the masked and predatory shape that last she took, and the face on the painting, which was Catherine’s but not Catherine’s.

I could hear no sound in the room, neither my pounding heart nor my breathing; I felt like unto a man under-water, in an element not his own, sucking in what was not air but something I could reach out and take an handful of, then mould it as a potter shapes his clay into whatever I did choose.

The room narrowed around me until I thought that I was inside a jar, like unto an homunculus myself; faraway, farther than a man can Imagine, farther than the planets of the most distant sun, a spark appeared in the dark that coiled within the glass; and faster than an arrow, or an horse a-galloping, or the very wind, this spark did travel towards me: I say, towards me, for I did know I was its target, but my gaze was captured by it; and it did grow and wax until that it filled the glass with shining light, a glowing so fair, so pure, that I did yearn for it with all my heart and soul, to the exclusion of all else.

This shining lasted but an instant and then did explode like unto soundless gun-powder, a flare that did shock and blind me so that I did fling up my hands to cover my face, dropping the glass; I heard it fall to the floor with a dull sound which did seem a very long way away; I think I cried out.

A-tremble I looked up, my vision clearing, and beheld standing within the triangle a figure so like unto Catherine that I had to glance to my wife (strange words to think yet, my wife) for to be sure that she yet sat there; then I did look again, and then to Roger, for neither one of them did stir, but were mute and unmoving as statues.

And then this second Catherine spoke, and she said, -You have called me so I knew you would.

I knew fear then, clenching in my belly and bowels, for but a brief instant: she stepped out of the confining triangle taking no heed on it. I stood up, not barely knowing I moved; she came another step and was near enough to touch and to embrace. I took her by her arms which were not merely like unto Catherine’s, they
⁸
Eagles don't bother going after mice
were Catherine’s own; my tarse went stiff in an instant and I pressed her close.

-Kiss me now, Fabian, she said, make me unready; and I was in a fever of desire, and her hands were busy.

As from faint and far-off I then did hear Roger’s voice raised in a shout, -Catherine, he cried.

And then I did kiss her; I felt her teeth sink into my lower lip, but there was no pain. And the next instant someone pulled her from out my arms and flung her aside, and I heard Catherine’s voice crying, -Get away, get away.

A hand seized hold on my arm, and I returned to my senses to see Catherine standing between me and the succubus which knelt on the floor with such hatred on her features I thought the venom of her glance would strike Catherine down like the stare of a basilisk. Roger let go my arm and I stepped out of the useless circle; my mouth began to sting. I put my fingers to the lip; they came away bloody. And seeing the blood then did fear flood in to me.

-Say this prayer after me, Catherine, cried Roger, you must banish her, you are her antithesis; and swift as a viper the creature dove to one side and seized the scrying-glass, which had rolled away from me.

-Very God of very God, I heard Catherine repeat after Roger, lend to me thy power that I may banish this succubus; and I saw that the air in the chamber was curdling again, but ’twas not from the prayer; she was using the summon-glass all the while they prayed, and the name that she did invoke was
Beelzebul.

Roger raised up his arms, but the creature did not cease her frightful summoning; some thing very great and very perilous hung just outside the air. she could not see me; I was hidden from her by Roger and Catherine; I pushed Roger to one side, took two paces to her and kicked the glass out of her hands.

At the same time Catherine cried
-Sic fiat, amen
,
²

and the creature vanished from sight with a great noise as of a rushing wind. Catherine and I fell into each others arms, but I did not need Roger’s white countenance to know that what had been summoned, remained, hovering as ’twere on the threshold of our mortal world. that it had not wholly been brought through from wheresoever it dwelt did not mean that it could not be; it was present in potential.

-I do not think I dare to look again in that glass, Roger said, his voice shaking.

-You placed us all in peril, I said, I’ll wager you knew your wards would not preserve us against corporeal evil.

-’Twas all I could think to attempt, he said, not a whit repentant; It worked, Fabian, did it not?

-Perchance it did, said Catherine, but not in the way you intended.

-Not entirely, Roger admitted, I did not foresee she would use the glass; I did not know she would know to, or be able to, having not imagination as do men.

-How can you know that? asked Catherine; for she was made of me, of mine own secret self; who knows but that she shared my desires and fancies also, and but took her pleasures because she could, and in the was that best suited her nature?

And Roger found this unanswerable; but I thought it made perfect sense.

‘“I wonder if this is a contrivance of the Enemy,” said Boromir. “They say in my land that he can govern the storms in the Mountains of Shadow that stand upon the borders of Mordor. He has strange powers and many allies.”

‘“His arm has grown long indeed,” said Gimli, “if he can draw snow down from the North to trouble us here three hundred leagues away.”

‘“His arm has grown long,” said Gandalf.’

J R R Tolkien,
The Fellowship of the Ring

Kim swore at the hearse-shaped Volvo estate which was cruising sedately along the fast lane at just under sixty, and swerved to pass it on the inside; the surge of power from the accelerator was like adrenalin.

Clear of the obstruction, she booted the pedal to the floor and the speedometer needle crept towards a hundred. She had
Tosca
on the stereo, and was, as usual, accompanying it, but her mind was not on the music. A feral urgency impelled her on to Fenstanton, but her thoughts were elsewhere. She felt like a kaleidoscope, her shapes and colours fragmenting minute by minute to form different patterns.

Fenstanton presented a sleepy fa
9
ade on a weekday. It seemed profoundly unlikely, preposterous even, that commerce was being carried on behind its closed doors, that such mercenary concerns made their home there. The people in its offices surely could not turn their minds to filing, or accountancy, or typing: the town seemed too relentlessly bucolic. Kim had never worked away from cities, and this gentler pace was another country to her.

She parked in a half-empty Pay And Display, watched a small bus disgorge a handful of passengers on the other side of the road, then headed for James Rendall’s little bookshop. The sudden awful thought struck her that it might be closed, but she shrugged it off and went on walking, passing a greengrocer’s displaying a selection of limp and rather dirty vegetables - hopefully captioned ‘Organically Grown’ - in wooden crates, a chemist’s with oddly shaped bottles gathering dust in the window as if it were still an apothecary’s, and the inevitable shoe-shop, before recognising the establishment she sought.

James Rendall was sitting by his elderly cash-register reading a Dick Francis paperback, which he put face-down on the counter as Kim approached. Recognising her, he smiled.

‘Still on the trail of the bells?’ he enquired.

‘No, we found those,’ Kim replied. ‘They were a red herring, I think. What we should really have been asking about was Roger Southwell himself.’

‘Ah. May one ask why?’

‘It’s rather complicated,’ said Kim. ‘I’m not sure I understand it all myself. How... receptive are you to the idea of magic?’

‘Depends what you mean by magic,’ said Rendall.

‘Roger Southwell’s magic. Mainly. And things from the past, encroaching on the present.’

The bookseller looked at her with narrowed eyes, his expression unreadable as a bird’s. ‘Let’s say I have an open but sceptical mind.’

Kim nodded. ‘Fair enough. Southwell, or someone, left a set of clues which led us to find - a certain artefact. This artefact displays qualities which are... inexplicable by any science I know. And I can’t help wondering if Southwell may have found some way to... influence people in the future. That is, now.’

‘Admirable,’ said Rendall, with a touch of acerbity.

‘What?’

‘An admirable display of not telling me anything at all, while seeming to say rather a lot. Have you ever thought of taking up politics?’

A number of retorts flashed through Kim’s mind, but she settled on reasonableness. ‘Mr Rendall, until I know exactly how you’re likely to react, I’m not going to reel off a story that sounds as if I’m barking mad.’ Rendall considered this, then relented. ‘I know enough about Roger Southwell to believe he could “influence people” in the future.’

With a sigh of relief, Kim said, ‘Then you might be able to help.’

She related the events of the past few weeks. Rendall listened without comment. When she had finished, however, he said reluctantly, ‘I don’t think I
can
help you.’

‘Why not?’

‘This is all quite new to me. I was under the impression that Southwell was primarily an alchemist - to which he added a hotch-potch of bits and pieces from other
“concealedarts”.
I haven’t got much stuff specifically about him, though - you’re welcome to read what I have. But I don’t think any of it is going to help you, unless it shows you somewhere else to look. If what you’re implying is that your Alan is somehow being influenced by Southwell.’

‘It’s not so much Southwell who worries me,’ said Kim frankly. ‘All right, he was a magician, he had these powers, but he was human. It’s that glass. That presence I felt in the studio - which Alan saw in the glass. And didn’t you say that Southwell hung bells in his tower to ward off a demon?’

Rendall’s head came up. ‘You’re saying this glass is a means of calling up something beyond the control of its summoner?’

‘No, I think it’s been called already. By Southwell. By Alan. I don’t know who by. I don’t know why Southwell wanted the glass found. I need to find out more about the man, to learn something about the demon.’

The bookseller stared at the closed glass door of his shop, and the relentlessly empty street beyond. ‘Well, I shan’t lose much trade by shutting up for a while now. Just wait a few minutes, then you can have the run of my library again.’ He started doing mysterious things which presumably were necessary to safeguard the closure of the shop.

As he pottered, Kim asked, ‘Do you know how the bells were supposed to keep this demon away?’ ‘That’s a fairly common superstition. People often used to ring bells to scare off the evil spirits of storms, for instance. Something to do with the essence of bell-metal, which I presume is iron.’

‘No,’ said Kim. ‘Bell-metal’s a mixture of copper and tin.’

‘Really? I was sure it’d be the “cold iron” syndrome.’

‘You get steel bells - very occasionally. They sound awful. They have a sort of wailing noise underlying the actual sounds of the bells themselves. I’ve rung on some. It’s not an experience I’d care to repeat.”

‘Can’t say I’ve ever noticed that different churches’ bells sound different.’

‘I guess you need to be a ringer to notice. Or fairly musical.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve got the original cloth-ears,’ said Rendall. ‘Right, I’m ready. Where’s your car?’

‘In the Pay And Display. Want a lift?’

‘Why not. Won’t hurt me to miss one walk.’

Apart from the strangely disquieting portrait, Kim had noticed very little in the bookseller’s house on her previous visit. This time, however, Rendall left her in the living-room and disappeared, presumably to fetch something from his library. It was an arctophile’s den: Kim counted eighteen bears, some most venerable, and vaguely recalled seeing more in the rest of the house. She concluded that no-one with such taste in companions could be all bad.

James Rendall reappeared carrying just one book, which he handed to Kim. ‘Start with this,’ he suggested. ‘I’ll go and see whether I can find anything else.’

Like all the other books she had encountered since the tomb, it was old: a brown-bound tome which creaked slightly despite her care in opening it. It was called
The Magus and his Magic
by one Edward Dunning, MA, FRS, and sub-titled
The Alchemical and Hermetic Tradition in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
In its table of contents Kim noted chapters devoted to John Dee, Giordano Bruno, some obscurer names, and halfway down, Roger Southwell. It appeared to be a short chapter, so she turned straight to it and began to read.

‘Those who spend any amount of time in research are, of course, apt to be diverted from time to time by red herrings. For some months the name of Roger Southwell, builder of “Fenstanton Abbey”, was wont to crop up in connection with magical matters, but I formed the impression, subsequently proved to be erroneous, that he was only a very minor figure in the canon of the Magi.

‘On the contrary, it appeared from later research, Southwell was indeed an important figure - not, however, because of any new ground he explored, but rather through what he achieved. If all the sources - contemporary and otherwise - are to be believed, Southwell was one of the very few practitioners of High Magic who actually succeeded in
making it work.

‘Little is known of his early life. The tradition persists that a contemporary account of some of Southwell’s exploits exists, in the form of a diary penned by one of his acquaintances, but I have been unable to locate it. Indeed, since it may be said that we suffer from a surfeit of seventeenth-century diaries written in impenetrable prose, I may venture to suggest this lacuna to be no great loss.

‘Returning, then, to the man himself. A strong local tradition maintains that he was born in a Wiltshire town, Market Peverell, some three miles from Warminster, in 1626. The family appears to have been well-to-do, but no further details are forthcoming.

‘The story proper, if such it can be designated, begins around 1657, when the construction of Southwell’s famous (or infamous) “Fenstanton Abbey” commenced. Southwell built this imitation “Abbey”, with its tower and ring of bells, on the pattern (it would appear) of Romsey Abbey, which, on the evidence of a 1692 oil painting by Edward Cluny, it closely resembled.

‘Southwell’s reputation locally was, in a word, mud. Of the many rumours circulating about him, some are unusually specific: not, for instance, that he had truck with devils, but that a particular
female
demon known as his “Dark Lady” was attendant upon him. Another version of this story asserts that the demon, far from being a familiar, was haunting him and that the sole purpose of the bells hung in the “Abbey” was to confound this malevolent spirit (a common belief with regard to bells).

‘Demons were also held to be source of Southwell’s fortune. By 1657 he was certainly a very wealthy man, and it was this
auri sacra fames,
according to one legend, which led to his death. Indeed it is a curious depiction of this story which ornaments his supposed tomb at Fenstanton.

‘I say “supposed” because reports conflict, and it is here that the most astonishing rumour about Roger Southwell comes to light. On the one hand, there is the simple local story: Southwell was excommunicated for his wizardly activities, and so was buried outside the churchyard. On the other there is absolutely no evidence to support these assertions;strict as the Puritans were, “excommunication” properly pertains only to the Roman Church. Quite the contrary, in fact, since Southwell’s name appears in the church of All Saints, Fenstanton, in the bell-ringers’ records; and there is also evidence that the present churchyard wall was erected subsequently to the tomb, which is dated 1697. Certainly Southwell seems to have disappeared from the vicinity of Fenstanton in that year, but there is no evidence at all that he either died, or was buried there.

‘Now we must move back to Wiltshire. Not far from the hill-fort at Battlesbury Hill near Warminster there is a mound known locally as “Roger’s Mount” in which it is said that a wizard is sleeping. The legend is as follows.

‘An aged magician (the implication being a “white” magician), having done battle with a demon all his life, but feeling himself becoming too frail to fight, entered the hill to sleep in order, presumably, that the demon, too, should become “dormant”. The wizard let it be known that he intended to sleep until such time as he was summoned, at which he would “clothe himself again in flesh” and return to life. Certain clues, which are not specified, were left in order for his avatar to accomplish this.

‘If the “Roger” of “Roger’s Mount” and Roger Southwell were one and the same, and the evidence suggests this, the conclusion appears to be that here was a man whose magic actually worked. Whether his plans ever come to fruition, and whether or not his reincarnation (if this is indeed what is implied) would be a good thing - especially for the man who accomplishes it (because presumably when Southwell wakes, so too will the demon) - are questions not within the scope of this work.’

‘Now the other thing,’ said James Rendall, making Kim jump by coming back in just as she finished reading, ‘is this.’ He handed her the incomplete pamphlet she’d seen before.

‘Yes, I’ve read that one,’ she replied, distracted.

‘I know. But it’s fairly contemporary - and you said it fell out of another book. Do you remember which one?’

‘I’d know if I saw it.’

Having identified the book, Kim re-read the strange chapter on Southwell while Rendall searched his records. It looked as though she ha been right about the treasure hunt: Alan had swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker.