The Devil's Apprentice Read online

  ‘Maybe I’d look better with mascara,’ Pen said absently.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry. It was your sister, the other night. I... I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I was coming out of the loo.’

  ‘My sister’s braindead,’ Gavin said savagely. ‘Don’t pay any attention. The last thing you need to worry about right now is mascara.’

  The shrill of the doorbell intruded abruptly. Pen put down her mug.

  ‘Where’s Quorum when you need him?’ Gavin said. ‘He should be around to answer the door. That’s what butlers do. We’re discussing heavy stuff here.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Pen.

  They both went.

  There was a girl on the doorstep. A teenage girl about Pen’s height with hair dyed a violent purplish auburn and cut to stick up in tufts, though much of it flopped unsuccessfully into her eyes. She had multiple ear-piercings and eyebrow-piercings, a nasal stud and the sort of lip ring known as a snake-bite. Her mascara was laid on like oil paint, an effect that might have discouraged Pen for life. She wore black – black jeans, flat black boots, short black jacket with hands thrust defensively into the pockets.

  Even her rucksack was black.

  She stared accusingly at Gavin and Pen. ‘Who’re you?’

  ‘I live here,’ Pen said, taken aback.

  ‘Have I come to the wrong house? I’m looking for Bartlemy Goodman. I’d expected some sort of caretaker.’

  ‘I’m the executor of Andrew Pyewackett’s Will,’ Pen declared, overlooking the claims of Jasveer Patel. ‘We’re still searching for Mr Goodman – he’s the principal beneficiary. Do you know him?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said the girl. ‘I was afraid he wouldn’t be here. Bugger. I really need to find him urgently.’

  ‘Join the club,’ said Gavin. ‘So do we.’

  ‘Not as urgently as me,’ the girl said curtly. Her voice tended to gruff and under the makeup her face, without being precisely sullen, indicated that sullenness might be an option, if the mood took her. She glared at Pen. ‘You’re a bit young to be somebody’s executor, aren’t you? What’s really going on here?’

  ‘I am the executor,’ Pen retorted. ‘Mr Pyewackett was rather eccentric. Who are you?’

  ‘Call me Jinx,’ said the girl, carelessly. It clearly wasn’t her name.

  Gavin and Pen exchanged a Look.

  ‘You can’t possibly be the executor,’ Jinx reiterated. ‘Executors have to be lawyers, or something like that, and I know there are lawyers mixed up in all this. I can’t remember the firm, but–’

  ‘It’s Whitbread Tudor Hayle,’ said Pen, skating over the truth, ‘and I’m Penelope Tudor.’

  ‘She is a lawyer,’ said Gavin, supportively. ‘What are you, anyway? A Goth?’

  ‘I’m a witch,’ said Jinx.

  Gavin and Pen swapped another Look, a longer one this time. Both of them were thinking of the Fury on the sea-monster. But this girl, whatever else she appeared, didn’t seem particularly dangerous.

  Pen said, without noticeable enthusiasm: ‘You’d better come in.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jinx

  London, twenty-first century

  JINX SAT IN the kitchen with a mug of Gavin’s hot chocolate, sniffing it suspiciously.

  ‘This has brandy in it,’ she said. ‘I can smell it.’

  ‘Improves the flavour,’ said Gavin.

  ‘Uncle Barty always gives people cocoa with brandy when they’ve had a shock. He has a special recipe.’

  ‘I knew it!’ Gavin exclaimed, distracted from other issues. ‘He’s a chef, isn’t he? He comes from this family of legendary cooks who worked with all the most famous chefs in the world. The name changes – sometimes it’s in French, sometimes German – but it’s always the same meaning. It’s always Goodman. He must know all the secrets of really great cooking – the oldest recipes, the magic ingredients–’

  ‘I don’t know about magic,’ said the witch. ‘Barty’s a good cook. He isn’t a chef, though. He just likes making nice food.’

  ‘Have you... have you eaten his cooking?’ Gavin demanded, on a reverential note.

  ‘Of course,’ said Jinx. ‘What else would I do with it?’

  ‘Gavin wants to be a chef,’ Pen explained. ‘He thinks Mr Goodman can teach him. But Andrew Pyewackett said he was a person who looked after things – a kind of professional guardian. That’s why he left him the house.’

  Jinx considered this. ‘That’s the house without a door,’ she said, evidently unfazed by the omission. ‘Number 7. Why does it need a guardian?’ And, after a pause: ‘Could you two stop looking at each other like that? Anyone would think you were concealing a murder.’

  ‘Close,’ said Gavin.

  ‘Cocoa for shock,’ nodded Jinx. ‘You don’t have to be a witch to smell a rat. As well as the brandy.’

  ‘What sort of witch are you?’ asked Pen, stalling for time. ‘Are you into – what do they call it? – Wicca?’

  ‘Baskets,’ said Jinx. (For a minute, owing to mumspeak, Gavin thought she was being offensive.) ‘I don’t do any of that New Age crap. I’m just an ordinary witch. The witchy kind.’

  ‘Do you do spells?’ said Gavin, on what he hoped was an ironic note.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Jinx, guardedly. ‘The spells showed me this place.’ She didn’t mention more mundane research into solicitors and Wills. ‘I got the gene from my great-grandmother. She had a hook nose and an evil eye and put curses on people, but I’m not going to end up like that. When I’m old, I want to be more... cuddly.’

  She certainly doesn’t look very cuddly now, Gavin thought. The eyelashes framed her eyes like iron railings, black and spiky. If you got too close, you could be impaled on them.

  ‘So how come you know Bartlemy Goodman?’ he said. ‘You called him uncle.’

  ‘I grew up in the village where he lived. He isn’t my uncle – he isn’t anyone’s uncle – but he’s an uncle sort of person. He taught me... how not to be a witch. That’s the important part. Too much magic drives you insane.’ Almost as an afterthought, she added: ‘He’s a wizard.’

  It fits, thought Pen. Damn. Mr Pyewackett must have known.

  ‘Is he insane?’ she asked bluntly.

  ‘No, of course not. He doesn’t use magic much – hardly at all, really. Like I said, that’s the important part. He likes cooking best.’ She flicked a glance at Gavin. ‘He says, when you’ve been around fifteen hundred years, you have a lot of time to develop special interests.’

  ‘Fifteen–’

  ‘Those people you thought were his relatives – well, they were probably all him. Wizards can live a very long time if they want to.’

  ‘Andrew Pyewackett was over a hundred and fifty,’ Pen volunteered. ‘But I don’t think he was a wizard. It was just the house. Anyway, he was dead when I met him.’

  ‘How dead?’

  ‘Quite dead,’ said Pen, ‘but it didn’t stop him talking.’

  ‘When are you going to tell me what’s going on here?’ Jinx demanded.

  ‘When are you going to tell us... everything you haven’t told us already?’ Gavin riposted.

  ‘And,’ said Jinx, temporarily diverted, ‘why is there a set of false teeth on that worktop? I don’t like the way they’re looking at me...’

  EXPLANATIONS TOOK A long time, and none of them were completely frank. Pen and Gavin said nothing about fear or guilt and, by unspoken consent, avoided any mention of how they had slammed the door in the face of the fleeing crowd. Jinx said: ‘Oh, portals. I don’t do portals,’ in the world-weary voice of someone who knows from personal experience there are a lot of worlds to be weary of. She was sixteen, still at school (when not playing truant), and the other two instinctively resented her insider knowledge without being quite sure what it was she knew. On her part, Jinx was wary of them because they were Londoners (she had always envied people who lived in London), because Pen was much too clever and Gavin much too fit, because 7
A had a butler and all the indices of class and privilege. She decided, with the ingrained superiority of her sixteen years, that they were too young to be burdened with the activities of the Oldest Spirit – the Lord of the Dark – and what he might or might not do. They had enough to worry about with Bygone House.

  When Quorum returned, he was introduced to Jinx, whom he eyed rather doubtfully, and they moved their conference to the living room while he made lunch.

  The teeth were waiting for them on the coffee table.

  ‘What are they doing there?’ Jinx said. ‘Are they following us around?’

  ‘They might be,’ Pen admitted. ‘They were Mr Pyewackett’s teeth. I think they could be haunted. Sometimes they talk with his voice.’

  ‘Haunted false teeth!’ Gavin scoffed.

  ‘Or they could be possessed.’

  ‘I never heard of any demon inhabiting a set of dentures,’ Jinx said. She extended her finger towards them. Suddenly, the teeth sprang, snapping viciously – Jinx pulled her finger back just in time. Gavin started violently.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ Pen said. ‘If you can’t behave, I’ll... I’ll put you in a glass, with a hankerchief over it. Get out of that if you can.’

  ‘We’ve learnt how to move around,’ said the Teeth, smugly. ‘You can’t fence us in. We’re the toughest teeth in town!’

  ‘My God,’ said Gavin. ‘They are possessed.’

  ‘A glass with a very heavy book on the top,’ Pen muttered.

  ‘Of course we’re not possessed,’ the Teeth protested. ‘Ignorant boy! We’re not haunted either. No one accuses you of ghostly or demonic possession, just because you want to have a conversation, do they? Talking is normal. And after three years in Andrew Pyewackett’s mouth–’

  ‘Rank,’ said Pen.

  ‘– naturally we’re going to sound like him. Things rub off.’

  ‘In this house,’ Pen said severely, ‘that seems to be the excuse for everything. Everything weird, anyway.’

  ‘It could be a sort of magical infection,’ Jinx suggested. ‘Like chickenpox. You said Andrew Pyewackett was an animated corpse, so... maybe the teeth caught animation off him. This space/time prism... thing... puts the whole place on the edge.’

  ‘The edge of what?’ said Gavin, who suspected she didn’t know what she was talking about.

  ‘Reality,’ said Jinx, who didn’t, but was determined not to show it.

  ‘Do you know why – how – you’re alive?’ Pen asked the Teeth.

  ‘The witch might be right,’ they said airily. ‘Then again, she might not.’

  ‘I don’t believe they know any more than we do,’ Gavin muttered.

  ‘As to the why, we told you that. We’re here in an advisory capacity, to watch over you and... give advice.’

  ‘You didn’t watch over her next door,’ Gavin remarked.

  ‘We’re not stupid!’

  ‘You haven’t given me any advice,’ Pen pointed out.

  ‘Don’t go next door?’

  ‘They’re useless,’ said Gavin dismissively.

  The Teeth made a great leap and bit him on the arm.

  Beyond the Doors

  London, seventeenth century

  IN THE CITY, the dying started slowly, one body at a time. They carried them out late at night when no one would see, hoping to bury them quickly, quickly, so the dead would be gone with the disease they died of, but soon there was too much work for the gravediggers to keep up, and the diggers themselves were sickening, and the dead cart would creak and groan through the streets as if of its own volition, calling for its nightly cargo. To begin with, they wrapped the corpses in sheets, to hide the tell-tale boils and the last anguish on twisted features, but sheets were precious, and the corpses kept on coming. Once, a beggar stole a cloth off the cart; they found him swathed in it three days later, stiff as a plank of wood. The word plague crept from lip to ear like a foul whisper, for the superstitious dared not say it aloud, and the doctors who tried to treat it died with their patients, sweating and coughing in the final fever. Roses, some named it, for the red rash that flowered on their skin. Ring-a-ring-a roses... The pickings grew lean for both tradesmen and thieves, and when Ghost went to Wily Jake’s in Cripplegate he saw the house was shut up and the windows boarded, and the woman who cooked for him peered from an upper casement, saying Wily Jake was counting pennies in hell.

  ‘They say there’s a special place for the Jewry,’ she said, ‘and you can bet that’s where he’s gone, lying his way into Purgatory to fence the gold from dead men’s teeth.’

  Ghost said he hoped so.

  Some people fled into the country, if they had friends or family there; some locked themselves in their chambers, eating and defecating in the same confined space; some tried to go about their business, with a posy of herbs in one pocket and a prayer in the other, shrinking from contact with their fellows. The king gave orders and the clergy got in touch with God and the nobles shut themselves behind high gates and kept company with their own kind. But the plague sneaked in everywhere, slipping through keyholes and under doors, making no difference between merchant and servant, prince and peasant. In the loft the Lost Boys talked and joked a little louder each evening to drown out their fear, growing reckless as the crisis deepened, stealing from under the very noses of distracted shopkeepers, pinching food from kitchens even as the cook collapsed. Ghost told them not to go near the sick but he knew they could hardly help it; the contagion was invisible and all-pervasive, the graveyard sigh that you breathed in unawares – a man might appear healthy one moment and be dead a few hours later. Ghost’s own fears grew by the day, by the hour. Every night on their return he counted his little band, and gazed hungrily into their faces, and would have hugged them if he had known how.

  Then the day came when one did not return.

  They found Sly in Groper’s Alley, shivering and stammering from the fever. Ghost wrapped him in a blanket, and carried him into the yard beside the Grim Reaper, and stayed with him till it was over, though the boy was hallucinating and didn’t seem to recognise him. He had no fear for himself, he wasn’t sure why. It was as if something set him apart, rendering him impervious to the pestilence, some aspect of his strangeness, the alien quality that made him who he was. There were a few like that, the chosen few, who walked the streets without a qualm, mysteriously invulnerable – scar-faced Cullen, who was rumoured to have survived the sickness in his youth, and now drove the dead cart, growing richer with every corpse, and Big Belinda, whom nothing touched. The porter had died early on, and Clarrie, and the witch who told fortunes.

  The tapster came out of the Grim Reaper, telling Ghost to take the boy away, but he would not go too close, and Ghost looked at him with stony eyes, until he backed down.

  Later that night he heard the grinding wheels of the dead cart as it lumbered down Porkpie Street, and lifted the little corpse easily – it weighed almost nothing – and watched the vehicle trundle off into the dark with the hunched figure of Cullen perched up in front, like a vulture on a pile of carrion. Every so often he would ring a handbell so people knew he was coming, not a deep solemn knell but a light, tinny, clanging noise, almost like the bells on the harness of a horse in a procession. Long after, when his life in the city was all but forgotten, Ghost would wake from nightmares hearing that tuneless tinkle, and the slow ominous groan of the dead cart wheels.

  Back in the loft, the other boys said little about their late companion. They were too busy trying to live, knowing the living was running out. One-Ear was feeding titbits to Edwin; the rodent looked fat and gleamy-eyed. It was a good time for rats.

  ‘We should leave the city,’ Ghost said, but they gazed at him in bewilderment. Where would they go? They knew no other place, no other life. Beyond the city was a strange country with nothing for them to steal and nowhere for them to be. Better to die here, if die they must, in the dark familiar world which was their home.

  Death was fearful, but leaving the c
ity was unthinkable.

  Ghost’s heart ached with a pain he barely understood, the grief of present loss, the foreknowledge of loss to come. He knew it wouldn’t be long now.

  Maggot was the next to go, sickening in his sleep four nights later. Ghost wanted to take him out of the loft to protect the others, but it was too late to prevent infection; they must rely on their meagre resources of youth and strength. Little Snot died almost unnoticed, and his brother Filcher vanished the following afternoon, lost in the wharfs and warehouses that bordered the river. Ghost liked to think that somehow he had escaped, though in his gut he knew it was merely a fancy. Then it was the twins’ turn, Ratface going first, leaving Pockface to succumb, whimpering and abandoned, two days after. He had wanted to go with his twin, and cried piteously for Ratface to wait for him, but Ghost dared not keep the body to fester in the heat, and the corpse cart creaked inexorably on its slow rounds, parting them in death as they had never been parted in life.

  ‘Bury them together,’ Ghost told Cullen when he carried the second twin out. ‘I have the money. I can pay.’

  ‘Bury them! Ha! There’s no time for burying. They’ll go in the pit with the other garbage. Give me your money and I’ll kiss them for you!’

  Cullen made a great show of his hardiness, often embracing the bodies of the girls; Ghost shuddered to think what he might do with them when he was alone. With his disfigured face and croaking voice he was not popular among living women, but the dead could not be so particular.

  ‘I’ve kissed them myself,’ Ghost said, and pressed his lips to Pockface’s forehead, before lifting him onto the cart.

  ‘Your turn next,’ said Cullen with more than his usual malice; he would not forget his partner’s death.

  Ghost shrugged and stepped back, letting the cart roll on.

  A louring heat had settled over the city like a miasma, a layer of air almost too thick to breathe, warm and clammy and seething with invisible life, with evil microbeings whose presence only Ghost could sense. He could imagine them swirling around his head or the heads of his friends, crawling over lips and tongue and into nostrils and eyes. ‘Bacteria,’ he said, though he couldn’t recall where the word came from.