The Devil's Apprentice Read online

  They went with Jinx to the hospital and learned with relief that she wasn’t seriously hurt. She had evidently struck her head on the parked car, causing possible concussion, and had suffered extensive bruising and the inevitable broken ribs where the moving vehicle had hit her. In shock from the accident and baffled by her clinical surroundings, Jinx herself was the last to realise she was going to be all right.

  ‘If I don’t make it,’ she said, clutching Pen’s hand, ‘tell Bartlemy... about Azmordis. He has to find... the Devil’s apprentice...’

  ‘Great line,’ said Gavin. ‘Shame it isn’t your last.’

  Since her next-of-kin were in the country – Jinx said she didn’t want to call them anyway, it was making too much fuss – they took her back to 7A that night, and installed her in the spare bedroom. Gavin left after supper promising to come back the next day and Pen went to look at the Teeth, which had started to chew their way through the atlas, getting stuck around South America. Once released, they jumped up and down spitting out bits of cartography and boasting of their prowess.

  ‘We – are – the Teeth! We – are – the Teeth! We can chew up the world – at least as far as Brazil. Nothing much left after Brazil. Today, the world, tomorrow, the telephone directory! We – are – the Teeth! We–’

  ‘You’re meant to be here to help,’ Pen interrupted. ‘Don’t you have any idea what’s going on?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue! But we can chew!’

  It had been a long day. Pen gave up and went to bed.

  IN THE MORNING, Jinx was ensconced on the sofa looking fragile, with the bleared remnants of yesterday’s eyeliner and mascara making her appear even more bruised than was actually the case. Pen sat on a chair beside her, realising she was stuck with the friendship whether she liked it or not and determined to make the best of it.

  ‘Did you see who was driving that car?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Jinx. ‘Did you?’

  ‘When it was parked, it looked empty. Then as it shot forward there was someone there, but I couldn’t make out a face or anything. I couldn’t even be sure if it was a man or a woman.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Jinx. ‘They were trying to kill me. That’s the important bit.’

  ‘You should tell the police.’

  ‘The cops?’ Jinx was contemptuous, evidently wishing to enhance her tough-girl image. (If she had one.) ‘What good would they do?’

  ‘They might find out whose car it was,’ Pen said, struggling to hang onto reality.

  Jinx didn’t even bother to answer.

  ‘You think it’s... him?’ Pen pursued, hating herself for sounding melodramatic. ‘Why would he...?’

  Jinx tried to shrug, and suddenly Pen saw she was shivering. A wave of feeling rushed over her, part unexpected sympathy, part remorse for her unfriendliness. She would have reached for her hand, but the other girl was huddled into her own arms, ribs twingeing at every move.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything like enough. Or maybe I know too much. Maybe that’s the problem.’

  ‘Too much about – the Devil – Azmordis – whatever you called him?’

  Jinx gave a sort of brusque half-nod.

  ‘In stories,’ said Pen, who never read any, ‘when a person knows too much, they always get murdered before they can tell anyone. It happens so often it’s a total cliché. If you tell me, now, there’ll be no point in murdering you, will there? Nobody ever gets murdered for something they’ve already told.’

  ‘Or we could both be killed,’ Jinx said without humour. ‘Bartlemy’s the one I have to tell. He’ll know what to do. You’re... how old are you? Twelve?’

  ‘Thirteen!’

  ‘Whatever. You’re too young to be mixed up in all this.’

  ‘I am mixed up in it,’ Pen said, trying not to take offence, and failing.

  There was a pause – a long, brooding sort of pause. Quorum came in with tea to which Jinx added three heaped teaspoonfuls of sugar.

  When he had gone Pen said: ‘Bartlemy Goodman isn’t here. I am. And Gavin. I mean, he isn’t here right now, but he will be. He’s in this too. We need to know exactly what’s going on. So we can... do something about it.’

  Jinx gave the kind of laugh that has no laughter in it. ‘None of us can do anything about it.’

  ‘In the hospital,’ Pen persisted, fishing, ‘you mentioned... the Devil’s apprentice?’

  More pause. More brooding.

  At last Jinx said: ‘All right. Since you’re doing this executor thing, I suppose you should know... You said your grandmother would be back later, right?’ She didn’t have much use for grandmothers (or great-grandmothers), from personal experience, but another adult around was another person to look out for trouble, even if they didn’t know about it. And Pen, Jinx reasoned, needed adult protection, though naturally she didn’t.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pen, ‘but I haven’t told her anything about... well, anything, really.’

  She was uncertain how Eve would react to their new guest, but hoped, in view of the accident, that she wouldn’t object too much.

  ‘Of course not.’ Jinx tugged at her hair, a leftover gesture from when it had been longer. ‘No one tells grownups the important stuff. Barty’s different – your butler too. The thing is, sometimes it helps to have people there...’

  ‘The Devil’s apprentice?’ Pen prompted.

  ‘It has nothing to do with the house,’ Jinx said. ‘At least, I don’t think so... If there’s a connection, I haven’t a clue what it is. This is about Azmordis. The Devil. He’s retiring...’

  ‘Retiring?’ Pen looked blank. ‘But... he’s an immortal, isn’t he? I thought – being the Devil was a job for life. And life is, like... forever.’

  ‘Even immortals get old,’ said Jinx, clutching her tea. ‘Actually, very very old. The way I hear it, he’s tired and jaded and just wants to sleep in Limbo until the end of Time. Whenever that is. But he has all the might of the Dark Tower, and thousands of servants and slaves, and minions and henchmen, and – and shadowy fingers in a million different pies, and centuries of plotting, and scheming, and snarling up the world, and he doesn’t want to throw all that away. So he needs a successor to learn his diabolical skills and... take over. He needs an apprentice.’

  This time, the nature of the pause was different. It was a pause of cold shock, of unbelief, of jumbled thoughts coming together in chaos.

  Pen said at last: ‘There really is a Dark Tower?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jinx. ‘Most things really are, somewhere or other. Magical dimensions and so on. Barty used to say, we have infinity and eternity. That means there’s room for everything. Anything we can imagine, it’s out there. He said, you should never underestimate the power of human imagination.’ She added, a little sadly: ‘He often said things like that.’

  ‘I don’t have any imagination,’ Pen said. Once, she had been proud of it.

  She was thinking: There’s more to this girl than meets the eye. A lot more...

  ‘So who’s the apprentice going to be?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jinx. ‘But it’s a human. That’s the worst part. A human with the Gift – witchkind, like me, only far more powerful. The thing is, there aren’t enough of the Old Spirits left, and those there are all hate each other, and lesser werefolk don’t have the right potential. So it has to be a human. Then they get – demonised, I suppose. Think of it: a human become immortal, with dark superpowers, ruling an evil empire as old as Time, with all the bright new ideas we humans have. Like... like atomic bombs, and germ warfare, and global warming...’

  There was a long, still moment. Then Pen said: ‘If you’re making this up –’

  Jinx made the noise generally written: ‘Huh!’, only it didn’t sound like that. ‘That’s why I have to find Bartlemy,’ she went on. ‘He’ll know what to do, if anyone does. If he doesn’t–’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Then we’re probably all going st
raight to Hell.’

  LATER THAT DAY, Eve Harkness returned to find a teenage Goth with a questionable pseudonym and several broken ribs residing on the sofa. On interrogation, Jinx admitted she had a mother, and the mother had a phone number, and yes, she had called already, explaining she had had a slight accident, and was perfectly all right, and was staying with some people who knew Bartlemy, who was an old family friend. Anyway, she would be well enough to go home tomorrow.

  Eve said: ‘What about school?’ and Pen said Jinx could come back, they broke up soon, and Eve found herself agreeing when she wasn’t at all sure agreement was a good idea.

  She didn’t even know the tiresome girl’s real name.

  ‘You seem to be acquiring some very strange friends lately,’ she remarked to her granddaughter when they were alone. Lately being since they came to Temporal Crescent.

  Pen had never had many friends. Matty Featherstone, and a couple of other girls at school, and the grownups, carefully vetted, with whom she discussed law issues online. Eve had assumed it was to do with being an only child and an orphan, too clever for her age, too self-sufficient for the company of her contemporaries. She had worried about it, because she always worried – and now, suddenly, there were other teenagers in Pen’s life, the boy Eve hadn’t met yet, this odd-looking Goth (‘Emo,’ said Pen), and she was worrying all over again, because she knew nothing about them, or their parents, or why Pen had changed so abruptly. Which was irrational, and she knew it, but that didn’t make it any less worrying.

  She would just have to get to know Pen’s new friends better – if she got the chance.

  Meanwhile, why on earth was there a set of false teeth on top of the sideboard?

  Beyond the Doors

  London, seventeenth century

  GHOST DREAMED HE was back in the Home, in bed with chickenpox. He’d had it very badly – so badly he was delirious – and he’d seen these creatures swarming above him, things with wings and pointy faces and little red eyes bright as flame, staring down at him with a kind of cold curiosity, as if they couldn’t quite decide whether he was interesting or not. Even when he had begun to recover, the memory of those dark winged beings had seemed more vivid than the grey reality around him.

  Now, he was trapped in a dream within a dream, and the swarm was back, clustering over him, subjecting him to the same dispassionate inspection, though what they hoped to divine he could not guess. Their faces tapered into elongated noses, with few features save for the eyes, but there must have been mouths in there somewhere since he could hear a sort of whispering, beyond the rustle of their wings, and he knew they were talking together. The odd thing was that, for all their strangeness, he wasn’t afraid of them. And once again they seemed far more real than the fevered confusion of his dreams.

  Beyond the swarm, the ceiling kept changing. Sometimes it was the off-white ceiling of the Home, with the discoloured patches where the damp had leaked through, and a single naked bulb dangling above him, swinging slightly whenever someone walked across the floor upstairs. Sometimes it was the underside of a roof, with criss-crossed beams and chinks here and there showing a fingerwidth of sky. Sometimes it was the curved ceiling of a caravan, and the sound of a woman whimpering close by, and the shadow of a man looming up huge and black on the wall; but that was an image from when he was very young, and he no longer knew what it meant. And then the swarm would come between, blotting out the changing ceilings, rustling and whispering, red eyes with pinpoint pupils bright as fire and cold as death.

  Once or twice, Ghost thought he was dead, dead and buried and gazing up at the inside of a coffin, but he hoped it wasn’t true, because there was something he had to do, some great anxiety hanging over him, and if he was dead it would be too late to avert disaster or change the course of his fate.

  One day he woke up knowing he wasn’t dead. The ceiling had beams and glimpses of sky, and the swarm had gone, and there was a normal face hanging over him, a pale face with a tired mouth and dark lank hair from which the curl had long dropped out. For a moment he thought it was Lauren from school – Lauren whose father beat her and who’d once given him a little pill that made the wallpaper climb up the walls – but then his perception shifted and the image of Lauren faded into forgetfulness, and there was Mags in her tawdry red dress with the dirty shift showing underneath, Mags with the gin on her breath and the usual sharpness in her face softened away by fatigue. Mags whose heart was kind, under the paint and the bright hard words and the bright hard jokes of her kind. They were all just girls underneath, like his gang who were just boys – girls and boys caught up in a game where grownups made the rules, and took the winnings, and didn’t stop to care when someone fell by the wayside.

  Then he remembered the truth. Most of his gang were gone.

  ‘You’re going to be all right,’ Mags said, touching his face. ‘Ghost... can you hear me? You’re going to be all right.’

  ‘Cherub,’ he said – his voice was a croaking whisper, so he hardly knew it for his own. ‘Weasel. One-Ear...’

  ‘Weasel went before: remember? Cherub’s well.’

  ‘One-Ear?’

  ‘He got sick after you, but he... he couldn’t fight it. He died this morning. He kept asking for someone called Edwin – Cherub said it was his pet rat, he said you killed it – but poor One-Ear, he didn’t know what he was saying, what with the fever an’ all. He was so hot, like there was a furnace in ’im, and then he died. I was afeared you’d go the same, but you fought it, three days you fought it. You always was the strong one.’

  She added, touching him again with a strange new timidity: ‘I’m glad you’re not dead.’

  ‘One-Ear,’ Ghost repeated. He couldn’t take it in. One-Ear had been his second-in-command, the boy to whom he was closest – the one who was always tough, always smart, always resilient, with the lightest fingers and the quickest feet and the sharpest tongue. Boys like One-Ear were born to dodge death and hang onto survival by the coat-tails; you could knock them down but never out; they would inevitably bounce back. One-Ear couldn’t die. Not he...

  ‘I had to kill the rat,’ Ghost said. ‘It was a plague rat. It brought death to us all.’

  ‘Rats don’t get plague,’ said Mags. ‘You was all about in the head. I daresay it was the sickness coming on. You don’t want to worry about One-Ear. I reckon he’s gone to a better place – he ’n Weasel ’n Clarrie ’n all of them. I don’t know about church, but there’s got to be a better place than here, even for the likes of us.’

  ‘There’s no better place,’ said Ghost.

  (The phrase meant one thing to Mags, and another to him. This was his city, and plague stalked the streets, but for Ghost there was no better place. There never would be.)

  ‘There’s just worms, and cold ground,’ he said. ‘That’s death. There’s no door to Paradise. The doors open... somewhere else, but it isn’t better. Just cleaner.’

  ‘That’s the fever talking,’ Mags said, ‘talking nonsense, though you ain’t burning now. It takes a while for your head to come right. Ghost... what’s your real name? I was thinking, it ain’t good to die, with no one knowing your name.’

  She went on: ‘Mine’s Margaret Pardoe.’

  ‘Random,’ he said. ‘Horwood. Random Horwood.’ He answered without reflection, before the memory slipped away. If he’d reached for it, he knew it would have eluded him.

  ‘That’s a queer name,’ said Mags, a fleeting smile crossing her face, like sunshine on a cloudy day. ‘I never heard of that.’

  ‘I like Ghost better,’ he said. ‘It fits.’

  ‘I like Random,’ she decided. ‘But I won’t tell it to anyone. Not if you don’t want. I can keep secrets.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ghost. ‘Keep mine. They are too much for me.’

  That night, he heard the dead cart coming for One-Ear. Creeeak-groooan went the wheels, and clang-clatter-clang went the bell, and it seemed like the whole city went quiet with listening for it. And the
n there was Cullen’s harsh laugh, like the cawing of a raven, and the sound of a body falling into the cart, bumping over the other bodies piled inside. Ghost slid down the ladder, and stumbled along the alleyway to the street, but he was too late, Mags and Cherub had thrown One-Ear in with the rest, and the cart was starting to roll away, creeeak-groooan, creeeak-groooan, and Cullen glanced over one shoulder to taunt him.

  ‘I heard you made it,’ he said. ‘You look more dead than alive, but there! you allus did. Ghost by name and Ghost by nature – and only a band of ghosts left for you to play the leader. Follered you all the way to the graveyard, didn’t they? A line o’ little ghosts, and a big Ghost leading ’em – that’s a picture to warm me ’eart, haha!’

  Ghost’s limbs were weak and his head was dizzy but the blackness filled him with sudden strength – the strength on the other side of weakness, born of fury and the night. Somehow, he leaped onto the cart, scrambling over the corpse-pile, treading on arms and legs and faces – on One-Ear’s cheek and mutilated ear-hole – the knife which had never let him down springing into his hand. Cullen was still cackling when Ghost pulled his head back and slit his throat. The cackle turned into a gurgle; blood ran down his coat and onto the road below. Ghost jumped down from the cart and watched it lumber away – creeeak-groooan, creeeak-groooan – with the dead man driving and the dead cargo heaped up behind him. When it rounded the corner he was still sitting on the box-seat, swaying gently with the motion of the vehicle, head slumped forward, reins clutched in his hand, until the cart had groaned its slow way into the dark and was lost to view.

  Infernale

  WHAT CAN YOU give the demon who has everything?

  The gift rested on a black velvet cushion, glittering like the Koh-i-noor, sending darts of light wheeling along the dim walls. Who the giver might be did not matter: the Devil has many adherents, some of whom are the wealthiest people in the world. They send him gifts in the same way that people send presents to the Queen: the object is ostentation, not generosity.