The Devil's Apprentice Read online

  And the boys – his boys – sleeping in the loft, knowing nothing of the danger that crept so close, so close... how could he protect them from this? What could he do? Suddenly, revenge on Big Belinda seemed a trivial matter. If the plague came, it might well prove unnecessary. How does it get here? he wondered. Does it blow on the wind? Does it flow in the water? He sensed the knowledge was there in his mind, just beyond the reach of his thought – the knowledge that might save them all – but he couldn’t quite touch it, and the harder he tried the more it eluded him.

  He went back to the loft and lay down in the dark, staring up at the roof beams with eyes that did not see.

  Eade, twenty-first century

  THE WITCH DREW the magic circle in lipstick around her mirror and chanted the invocation, but the grinnock did not come. She gazed into the basin, but there was only the blood trail uncurling on the surface of the water. At Thornyhill Manor she lit the spellfire, but all she got was a room full of smoke.

  She said: ‘Bugger,’ and other words of conjuration, to little effect.

  Eventually, after much coughing, the smoke was sucked into a kind of whirling cloud, blotting out the fire, and a hole opened at its heart. She peered into it with watering eyes but could see only blackness. And then, as her vision adapted, the blackness acquired depth and definition.

  Black wings against a black sky. Not the black of night but the black of deep space arching above the atmosphere. Something that could not be clearly seen was ascending slowly, with another creature in its grip, a far smaller creature, which struggled. A soft cold voice quoted or misquoted:

  ‘Just for a spoonful of jam he betrayed us

  Just for some sugar to sweeten his blood...’

  Suddenly, she knew the struggling thing was Simmoleon.

  The wingbeats climbed higher, higher – the writhing figure was released and began to fall, screaming, down through endless layers of cloud. The black lightened to grey, grey towers of cumulus and mist-curtains which shifted and dissolved into one another. Other wings converged on the falling shape, smaller but still very large, raven’s wings or vulture’s wings or harpy’s wings, a whole flock of them blotting it out, impeding it, until it didn’t fall any more, and the screaming changed, mixing with a kind of gurgle, and then stopped altogether. The wings beat furiously. Two or three droplets escaped, streaming down through the last of the cloud, through empty air and sudden busyness, splashing red onto the ground. Feet trod on them unseeing.

  She would have been horrified, but there was no time. The vision was swallowed up as if sucked into a vacuum, and then there was electric light, cosiness, a warm friendly interior. A kitchen.

  She had been expecting to see a kitchen for some time – an old-fashioned kitchen with oak beams and hanging bunches of this and that and a stove or Aga, with a fat little cauldron bubbling surreptitiously on the hotplate. But this was a modern kitchen, too small for convenience and littered with knife and chopping board, bowl and saucepan, olive oil and garlic cloves, sliced onions and skinned tomatoes. The cook, too, was all wrong, too young, too handsome, too black, wearing an expression of concentration and a hooded sweatshirt with the hood down and, on the back, the lettering Jamie Who? A mouth-watering smell wafted out of the picture, but the witch was frowning.

  In the background, a female voice complained: ‘I don’t see why you always have to cook. We could have got a takeaway.’

  The witch stared in bewilderment as the image faded, leaving her with nothing but the smoke and a faint afterscent of frying onions. She drew back, murmuring the words to close the invocation, still frowning slightly.

  ‘Too many cooks,’ she said out loud, ‘and too little broth. You can’t make an omelette without putting all your eggs in one basket. I wish I knew what the hell was going on.’

  Witches were supposed to know what was going on, or, if they didn’t, to be able to find out. She thought of Simmoleon, falling out of the sky, and the converging wings, and the blood drops hitting the ground far below. He had been a grinnock, a lesser werecreature, ugly, amoral, unpleasant, with a sweet tooth and sour nature – a being of little account, half spirit half substance, gone now into Limbo until the world ended. She could call up another, pester and plague and bribe, but...

  But she didn’t.

  Later that day, using less ethereal channels, she learned an address. She wasn’t sure it would be much use, since if the person she wanted was there, the spells would have shown her, but it was worth investigating.

  She thought about it when she went to bed, and woke in the dark hours from a nightmare of wings, her head suddenly very cold and clear.

  If they knew about the grinnock, they know about me...

  He knows about me.

  Azmordis – Ingré Manu – the Devil – the lord of Earth – the god of Chaos and Despair – the dark Suit in the Dark Tower – he knows about me...

  London, twenty-first century

  GAVIN LASTED TWENTY-FOUR hours before calling Pen, breaking his resolution when the worry set in that if he didn’t she might start exploring Number 7 on her own. It wasn’t that he thought of her as a potential girlfriend: himself fifteen, he considered her far too young and in need of general prettification. Perhaps if she were to make up, grow up, jack up her skirts – but for the moment she was a mate, they had shared horrifying adventures, that was what mattered. Determined not to apologise and unsure what to say, he found himself asking her to supper.

  Two nights later, with the reluctant consent of her grandmother, Pen was sitting in the Lesters’ home in the less elegant part of Clapham, surrounded by his two sisters and younger brother, his mother and grandmother (his father, who did something technical for Thames Water, was at work), two cats and a hamster. To an only child orphaned at an early age, it was all a little overpowering. (The grandmother, Pen decided, did look like Beyoncé, if Beyoncé had been in her sixties and dressed by Primark.) Gavin cooked, haddock in Parma ham with some sort of ratatouille, the finer points of which clearly bypassed his family, though they all expressed appreciation except his older sister Dianna, who had a date and wanted takeaway because it was quicker. His brother Richmond apologised in an aside for the lack of chips and other sister Bobbi offered in mitigation that he made really great puddings, especially chocolate mousse.

  ‘He’s very good at English,’ Gavin’s nan confided. ‘He could go to college. Cooking is all very well, but you don’t get respect. College boys get respect.’

  ‘I think cooking’s a great idea,’ Pen said loyally. ‘Gavin could have his own restaurant, or a TV show.’

  ‘What’s TV nowadays?’ Gavin’s nan dismissed the notion with a wave of her hand. ‘I remember when you had to be clever to be on TV; you had to be able to sing or do jokes or talk about art and things. Now, it’s all this reality crap – you get just about anybody. They even had our hairdresser’s daughter going off to be a model. Model – huh! Bandy Mandy! She’s got no looks – no curves – just legs like a stick insect and nothing in her head at all. Her mum was so full of it, you couldn’t get into the salon without tripping over her ego. Telly’s not what it was, I told her. You’ve got to be loud – you’ve got to be common – to be on TV these days. Look at Big Brother. She didn’t have any answer to that.’

  Nor did Pen. Matty Featherstone was always criticising her for not watching Big Brother.

  ‘What do you want to be?’ Gavin’s mum asked by way of a diversion.

  ‘A lawyer,’ Pen said.

  There was a short pause. Dianna muttered: ‘Boring,’ not quite under her breath.

  Gavin’s mum said hastily: ‘What sort of lawyer?’

  ‘Crime.’

  There was a collective sigh of relief, tangible if not audible. Crime was interesting. Crime was cool.

  ‘Like, defending murderers and stuff?’ Richmond said, impressed. ‘Proving people innocent when they’re wrongly accused?’

  ‘Pen could do that,’ Gavin said. ‘She’s pretty smart.�
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  ‘Lawyers can get good money,’ said his nan, pointedly. ‘Lawyers get respect.’

  Fortunately for future relations between all concerned, Gavin’s mum cleared the plates and they moved on to chocolate mousse.

  Later, coming out of the bathroom, Pen overheard Dianna and Gavin talking in the hall.

  ‘She looks like a kid,’ Dianna was saying scornfully. ‘I thought you were getting back with Josabeth–’

  ‘Look, Pen’s just a friend, okay?’

  ‘She isn’t even wearing mascara–’

  ‘Mascara isn’t a sign of maturity! Anyway, at least she doesn’t spend all the time telling me how pretty she is–’

  ‘Not much to tell!’

  ‘– and she’s really good company–’

  ‘Yeah? She hardly opened her mouth all through supper. Too stuck up–’

  ‘Posh off!’

  Dianna slammed her way out of the house and Pen waited till Gavin went back into the living room, struggling with mortification, and anger, and an idiotic urge to burst into tears. It took more courage to go back downstairs than it would have done to open the broom cupboard again, but she put on what she hoped was a poker face and returned to the family party. She’d felt so adult of late, if not always in a good way, and now she was being condemned because she didn’t wear mascara...

  But Gavin smiled when she came in, and his mum offered her tea, and his nan said Dianna was a fool, always running after the boys instead of letting them run after her, which made Pen feel a very little better. After all, it didn’t matter about Josabeth Collins, whoever she was, because it wasn’t as if she really fancied Gavin: she just liked him. Sometimes.

  ‘I’ll come over at the weekend,’ he told her on her way out. ‘We’ll talk about what to do next.’

  She didn’t say: We have to go back into the house. She didn’t need to. The house was the secret which bound them together. Whatever they had told Quorum, they both knew they would go back.

  ‘RIGHT,’ SAID GAVIN. ‘Torch. Bar of chocolate for emergency rations. Pen-knife. Stun-gun. Piece of paper reminding me who I am. That’s everything I could think of. No point in taking a mobile: there won’t be any signal.’

  It was Saturday, their designated day for exploration. Eve had gone home till the following day, trusting Pen to Quorum’s care, and the butler himself was out shopping. The after-school slot on weekdays wasn’t long enough, or so they felt. That meant weekends only, at least until the school holidays.

  ‘I don’t have a knife or a stun-gun,’ Pen said. She was carrying her little rucksack, which contained a very large torch (the only one she could find), a velvet scrunchie (she was wearing her hair loose again), her personal CV, her notes on the house, two cereal bars, and a spare pair of knickers. ‘Anyway, we’re only going to look. No going through the doors any more. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Right...’

  ‘Why is there a set of false teeth on that table?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  The teeth had taken to following Pen around in some mysterious fashion, turning up on the sideboard in the dining room during tea when her grandmother was out, or on top of the new widescreen television, or sitting – if teeth can sit – next to her laptop. Quorum denied moving them and Pen, though suspicious, believed him. The teeth hadn’t spoken again: they simply grinned at her. On several occasions she had caught herself almost starting to talk to them, controlling the impulse sternly; she had no intention of becoming the sort of person who had conversations with inanimate objects, especially if the objects in question were prone to answer back. That way lay fairytales, and flying carpets, and magic. She wasn’t having any of that.

  They went into the utility room and through the front door into Number 7.

  The quiet engulfed them like a cocoon, except that a cocoon was a safe place, and Bygone House didn’t feel safe. As Quorum had said, it was like being in the still centre of something: the noises were there, on the edge of the silence, the distant murmur that was London, and the other noises, waiting beyond the doors, the unheard noises, the dragon’s roar and the screech of the roc and the strumming of long-broken fiddles and the whispers of long-failed plots. Pen thought she could feel the pressure of all those countless worlds teeming and shifting around them.

  She said: ‘I want to find out who does the cleaning here,’ but although they went up to the top floor, tiptoeing tentatively along every passage, they couldn’t see anything. There was a table on each landing, one with a vase of daffodils, far too early in the year, the other with a spray of red autumn leaves from no tree Pen or Gavin could recognise. A couple of surreal landscapes hung on the walls – a desert with footprints disappearing across an endless vista of dunes, and a country lane, rutted and puddled, with more footprints, perhaps the same ones, vanishing into a wood – and in an alcove there was an ugly china dog with pointed ears and a squashed muzzle. Outside the rooms, there was nowhere for anyone to hide.

  Back downstairs, Gavin said: ‘If there was a flea here, we’d have seen it. There’s nobody but us.’

  ‘I suppose so. I mean, of course not. It’s just...’

  ‘D’you want to try one of the doors?’ She nodded. ‘Okay, so where do we start?’

  After all, it was her house, at least by proxy.

  ‘The library,’ Pen said. ‘That’s where I saw the monk. For one thing, it wasn’t dangerous. And... I’m not used to hearing Latin spoken, I only ever see it written down, but I think from what he said he’d been interrupted like that before. Which would mean the door sometimes opens on the same place.’

  ‘More of your pattern idea,’ Gavin said.

  ‘If connections recur,’ Pen said, ‘that would be really significant.’

  ‘You sound like my science teacher.’

  ‘Good.’

  Pen opened the door, more gingerly than ever, nudging it back an inch at a time...

  Beyond the Doors

  Amsterdam, seventeenth century

  THE FIRST THING she saw was the crocodile. It was looking straight at her, its black-and-gold stare unblinking, its parted jaws a-gleam with teeth. For an instant, she stopped breathing.

  Then she realised it was stuffed.

  She pushed the door open further. Gavin peered past her, one arm moving to encircle her shoulders, though whether by way of protection or restraint, or simply for the reassurance of contact, neither of them could tell. They were gazing into a fair-sized room with a beamed ceiling and natural light pouring through the windows. There was a long wooden bench nearby and shelves round the walls, and every available surface was crowded with an extraordinary jumble of objects – plaster busts, steel helmets, antique glassware, globes, gourds, branches of coral, skulls both animal and human. The remaining wall space was hung with shields and antlers and assorted weaponry, and on the floor there were cauldrons stuffed into woven baskets, clam-shells and tankards and twists of driftwood. It was a collection apparently without theme or function, an Aladdin’s cave of bric-a-brac from all over the world. But Pen and Gavin gave it only a brief glance. Their attention focused almost immediately on the man.

  He was leaning against the bench with his back to them, one foot on an adjacent stool, a board resting on his knee with paper attached. He was very short and thickset with a fuzz of untidy hair, his clothes from some indeterminate period in history when clothes were rumpled and tucked, baggy and bulky – the sort of clothes that look uncomfortable but in this case had been worn or bullied into comfort. There was a pen behind his ear dribbling ink into his hair and he was holding a sea-shell, turning and turning it to catch the light.

  Gavin whispered: ‘Have you seen enough?’

  ‘I suppose so...’

  The man turned round.

  He wasn’t beautiful, the way the prince had been – his face, like his body, was thickset, with blunt, soft features – but there was something about his eyes, something Pen would try to recall, long after. They were eyes w
hich didn’t just look, they saw. Bright curious eyes, discerning and yet somehow detached – the eyes of an observer, fascinated and slightly baffled by the world he was born to see.

  He smiled at them both and said something in a language they didn’t understand which sounded like a cross between German and gibberish. Then he put down the sea-shell and beckoned. Pen had stepped forward before she thought about it.

  Gavin said: ‘Pen–!’

  ‘I’m all right,’ she insisted.

  She was only a couple of yards away from the door. The man didn’t appear to be interested in who they were, or how they got there. His bright curious eyes were fixed on Pen’s face. He took her by the shoulders, very gently, turning her to the light the way he had turned the shell. Then he took the pen from behind his ear, dipped it in an open ink bottle, one of several on the bench, balanced the board on his knee and began to sketch.

  ‘For God’s sake, Pen–’

  ‘I can’t talk now,’ she said, without moving her lips.

  The man went on sketching. His fingers were stubby and clumsy-looking, but the way he held the pen reminded Gavin suddenly of how he held a knife, when he was filleting something difficult, or slicing vegetables to a precise thickness. There was a kind of certainty in his touch. He’s an artist like me, Gavin thought, not in conceit but recognition. That’s why he’s got all this stuff. These are things he likes to draw.