The Devil's Apprentice Read online

  She said to Pen: ‘What are you going to tell your gran?’

  ‘God knows,’ said Pen.

  THE DUKE STAYED in the tower room a night and a day. But he was thirsty, and by the following evening he felt light-headed – lack of food, he told himself – and the rat-bite on his ankle was swollen and sore. He opened the doors very gingerly, listening at each before he slid the bolts, venturing at last into the main house. It seemed deserted: the rats had gone and the servants hadn’t returned. But there were always more servants, just as there were always more rats. He felt suddenly hot, and suddenly cold; there must be a draught from somewhere, though the windows were closed.

  Near the dining room he saw the paw-trails, a dead rat, a legless chair. He pushed the door open and went in.

  The Duke had no nerves; he had never needed them. Prudence had kept him in the tower room, not fear. Fear was what you inflicted, not what you felt; his father had taught him that, and it was a lesson he had never unlearned.

  The dining table was picked clean. So were the guests. They sat as they had sat the previous night, dressed in a few chewed rags of clothing, arm-bones, if still attached, sprawled along the table, bare skulls slumped from broken vertebrae. Fingers had not fared well, the fiddly little joints gnawed and scattered. Hunks of wig hair huddled like giant caterpillars on the floor and crawled across the stained silver. The Duke noted automatically that the table linen, as well as the china, would have to be replaced. He was proud that he noticed that. Nothing dulled the steely edge of his intelligence, or so he reassured himself. The inside of his head felt strange, thoughts swimming blearily through his brain, but that was only to be expected: he must find food and drink. Why had he come to the dining room, when he knew there would be none there? The fate of his dinner guests did not trouble him. Where there was a dukedom, where there was power, where there was money, there would always be dinner guests. He glanced round at them, his mouth curling in disdain. They died; he survived. He survived. That was all that mattered.

  Then one of the skulls jerked upright, propping its jawbone on a fingerless wrist. It grinned at him.

  Skulls always grin; it’s the way they’re arranged.

  ‘Won’t you join us, your Grace?’ it said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Wizard’s Return

  London, twenty-first century

  GHOST STEPPED OUT of the front door, into the street he remembered from long ago. It was the same street where he had climbed the wall to Number 7, the same houses, the marble urns and pillared porches, the feathered tops of tree and shrub behind high gates, but there were subtle differences. Like a dream which changes, so the familiar becomes alien, and known faces morph into strangers, and the place which looked the same is somewhere you have never been. There were more cars, parked nose to tail, and they looked somehow wrong, bigger, shinier, less car-shaped, gleaming eggs of glass and chrome and steel. The woman walking along the opposite pavement was dark-skinned and exotic, wearing a Muslim headscarf; there had been immigrants around in the seventies, but not in Hampstead. Some way behind her came a youth, talking into one of those new mobile telephones like Gavin had, which resembled something out of Star Trek. He was speaking a language which Ghost didn’t recognise: he thought it might be Russian. But surely there were no Russians in London, they were the enemy, the bad guys of the Cold War, shut away behind the Iron Curtain in the icy countries of eastern Europe...

  The worlds shifted in his head, memory melting into memory, different realities overlapping, mingling, dividing. For a moment his whole heart ached for home – for Groper’s Alley and Running Lane and the loft he had shared with the Lost Boys – but it was already slipping away, fading among the muddled images of another past, another present. He tried to think of Mags and Cherub and Tomkin, whether they had finally escaped to the country, whether he had saved them, or left them to die, but both the faces and the feelings were growing blurred, and all that remained was a formless pain which he knew would never be assuaged. And Ghost, too, was dimming, a phantom like his name, gone in the daylight of this gleaming new century. Now, there was just Random Horwood, the abandoned boy who played truant from school and planned to run away when he was old enough, to live rough, act tough, be smarter than the bullies, smarter than the law, and never lose a fight again.

  Once, he remembered, he had had a mother, who had cried when they took him away, but only a little. Sometimes he had hated her, mostly he claimed to be indifferent, but occasionally he dreamed of rescuing her as he had wanted to rescue Mags and the boys, though he wasn’t sure from what. But more than thirty years had passed, and she would be dead, or old (he hoped she was dead), and even if he found her she would hardly recognise him, a Peter Pan figure who had never grown up. He wondered where he was to go, what he was to do with his new life, in this new world. Would they put him in another Home, all bright and efficient, a factory processing children, and send him to school, and plug him into a computer, like Pen and her laptop, to turn him into Twenty-first Century Boy?

  ‘You don’t really exist,’ Jinx had told him, evidently considering this an ideal state. ‘No identification, no identity. You’re an illegal immigrant from another dimension. As long as no one finds out, you’ll be okay. Of course, if you’re caught, you might have to claim asylum.’

  ‘I won’t let them take me to any asylum,’ Random had said.

  ‘That isn’t what she meant,’ said Pen. ‘Don’t worry. You can stay here. We’ll look after you.’

  They had heard the whole story now, complete with flick-knife and ratfest. It made them careful around him, as if he might too easily break apart, or implode. But looking after him, surely, was the whole point of their adventure...

  They hadn’t told him about the Devil yet, or that he was a candidate for the job.

  Eve had been appalled by the new arrival, saying he must have run away from home, and if he didn’t have a place to go she would have to call Social Services. Quorum, suppressing his own disapproval, had improvised with a skill that won admiration even from Jinx, explaining that Random was a distant relative of Andrew Pyewackett, so of course he would have to stay, at least for a short time. Eve couldn’t argue with that, though clearly she wanted to. Then the butler had gone out to replenish their food supplies, saying whatever he’d done the poor boy was far too thin to be healthy.

  And so Random stood looking down the street, lost not in the past but the future, numbed by his new stupidity, his ignorance, his helplessness.

  Behind him, Pen said: ‘Come back in.’ She spoke gently, as if coaxing a stray dog.

  He went in.

  From the shadow under a leaf, from a crevasse in the wall, the watchers saw him go.

  Infernale

  IT IS ALWAYS dark in the Dark Tower. The sun never shines beyond those black windows; if it is daylight, it will be grey daylight under louring cloud, with louring cloud beneath blanketing the lower world. As darkness deepens the cloud thins, and far off there will be drifts of tiny lights, fine as the dust of stars – the streets and flyovers, office blocks and apartment blocks of every city on the planet. It is said, there is a side road, a courtyard, an alleyway in the heart of each metropolis which will lead you to the Dark Tower, if you wish to find the way. And from the highest pinnacle the Devil looks out over his empire – his, he calls it, though his name is not on any deeds – as the God of the ancients once looked out, and believes, in his arrogance, that this is what he has made.

  He cares nothing for industry or commerce, hedge-funds or ditch-funds, the free market or the black market: only for power. He was here from the beginning: he saw the dinosaurs come and go, and the fish crawl out of the primal sea and grow legs, and he knew the earth when it was still in the melting pot, when the fire-spirits danced their airy dances over bubbling ocean and burning land. The strength of earthquake and tsunami, of firewind and wildwind, flowed in his essence like blood. And then a band of thin-skinned apes came down from the trees, and stood
up on their hind legs, and set out to rule the world. His world. They taught him that the powers of storm and darkness were as nothing beside the power of the imagination and the cunning of human hands. They made him in their image, and he called himself their ruler, their Dark Lord, and even now, when the world he knows has grown old and tired, he cannot let them go.

  Above the circular office there is a small platform around the topmost spire, ringed with a single rail, and there he stands, he alone, though the Nightwings may come and go at his command, looping the tower in dark spirals, bringing him word of the kingdoms below. No others fly so high, or so far. He looks out over his empire, through cloud and darkness, and sees with other eyes than his own, the eyes of the watchers in the shadows. Sees a boy in a doorway, also looking out, though not in lordship and power – a boy pale and alone, afraid of what lies beneath his heart.

  ‘Saetor!’ cries the Devil. ‘Saetor Czesarion!’

  A shadow cuts through the cloud, swifter than sound, the boom of his wingbeat following him like an echo.

  ‘It is time. He is here. The first of the chosen few, the honoured ones. Bring him to me!’

  The Fellangel dives again, plunging earthwards like a meteor, and the cloud foams in his wake.

  London, twenty-first century

  RANDOM SLEPT THAT night on the sofa in the sitting room. The cushions were soft, the room was warm, and he knew he hadn’t been so comfortable in a long, long while, but still he dozed uneasily, waking at intervals to see the unnatural glow of a nearby street lamp paling the window, and looking in vain for the stars through cracks in the ceiling. His dreams were haunted by the same spectres who had spied on his fever, clustering above him rustling their wings and whispering with lipless mouths. Even when he was fully awake they would take a few minutes to fade away, leftovers from the world of sleep clinging on in the darkness.

  Hoover had positioned himself close by, and at times Random caught a whiff of canine halitosis as the dog sat up to check on him, or felt the rasp of a rough tongue on his arm. Despite the odour of animal breath, his nearness was reassuring. In the confusion of shifting worlds in his head, Random sensed the dog was a presence at once stable and protective, offering unspecified comfort. He let his hand fall on Hoover’s neck, stroking instinctively, and somehow the act soothed him, even more than his companion, and he drifted at last into a sleep without nightmares or phantoms, waking long after daylight when Quorum brought him some tea.

  In her room Pen, too, was restless, for all her weariness. On the table beside her bed the Teeth supplied rather less reassurance than Hoover. If dentures can sleep, they appeared to be sleeping, occasionally champing, or grinding together, or emitting a gurgly snore.

  ‘You snore through your nose,’ Pen muttered, ‘not your teeth,’ but the Teeth merely grunted, and subsided back into a gurgle.

  Pen wondered if this was what it was like to sleep with a man, and whether Gavin snored, and felt herself blushing, though she never blushed, and turned her thoughts hastily elsewhere, back to the unanswered questions which had kept her awake in the first place.

  What did she actually know about Bygone House?

  The doors opened into the Past, into dimensions of myth and legend, ‘worlds of the imagination,’ Quorum had said once. But where didn’t they lead? Not the future, Quorum averred, because the future hasn’t happened yet, though the alternative present or near-present was always a possibility. And, as far as Pen could tell, there were no other planets or different universes. The dimensions were all more or less within this world. And somewhere in the background, like a watchful shadow, was the presence or immanence of Azmordis, the Dark Lord in the Dark Tower, an ancient spirit who had infested the space/time prism from the beginning. That’s it, Pen thought, I need to go back to the beginning. I have to understand how the house actually works. One door to Somewhere or Nowhere, one door to Elysium or Faerie... One door. That was how it started. One door spawning others, like reflections in a multiple mirror, like an onion growing new layers...

  Suddenly, she sat up, staring into the darkness.

  Eureka!

  The idea that had come to her was so clear, so right, she knew this had to be the truth about Bygone House, the pattern she had been looking for all along. She lay down again, still far from sleep, thinking her way through every twist of the maze.

  IN THE MORNING, after breakfast, she explained it to the others. Eve had gone to work, but Gavin, Jinx, Random and Quorum listened while she expounded her theory with the enthusiasm of a physicist who has just discovered cold fusion.

  ‘Because it looks like a house you expect it to behave like a house,’ she said, meaning Number 7. ‘But what is a house anyway? It’s a kind of... of man-made exoskeleton. It takes our needs, our lives, and separates them into compartments, and puts walls around them. So the space/time prism looks like a house partly as camouflage, but also because that’s the most appropriate shape for it. It’s something that grows and functions like a living organism, like a human mind. It does the things minds do. It has memory and imagination.’

  ‘You’re saying the house is alive?’ Gavin queried.

  ‘Not exactly. It could be – I don’t know – the point is, I think it acts like something living. Living things grow because cells divide and multiply. Well, this place started with one door, one portal, then that divided into two, and four, and so on, and the house literally grew, adding more doors, more walls, until–’

  ‘Until when?’ Gavin pursued. ‘Indefinitely?’

  ‘Until it reached its optimum size, I suppose. Like everything else. Things can only grow just so big. Otherwise the laws of science trip them up, gravity drags you down...’

  ‘So when is a space/time prism maxed out?’ Gavin wondered, still sceptical.

  ‘How is it like a mind? Does it think?’ Jinx said, from under a familiar scowl.

  Since she couldn’t answer the first question, Pen went for the second. ‘I don’t know if it thinks, but look at the way it’s organised. It has doors into the past: that’s memory – and magical dimensions: that’s imagination. There’s the study, where you get artists and monks writing books – thought and theory. Then the reception room or living room, with parties and plots and social interaction. Monsters in the broom cupboard – that might be the subconscious. Houses reflect the human mind. Number 7 looks like a house and functions like a brain. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

  ‘It sounds most ingenious to me,’ Quorum offered, politely encouraging.

  ‘It does make sense,’ Jinx said unexpectedly, frowning at her own thoughts. ‘Everything shifts about in your mind, too. I mean, memories don’t stay put. Different ones pop up at different times. You forget things and then you remember them. You have ideas and then they go away. The mind is a space/time prism, so... a space/time prism is a sort of mind.’

  ‘It’s an explanation,’ Gavin concluded. ‘I suppose time will tell whether it’s the right one.’

  LATER THAT MORNING they were in the sitting room explaining to Random about Azmordis, and how he was supposed to be the Devil’s apprentice, or a candidate for the apprenticeship – to turn to his dark side and misuse what power he had in the service of Evil. Unfortunately, Random’s youth in the seventies predated the first Star Wars movie, which made the explanation rather more tangled than it should have been.

  They weren’t calling him Ghost. Gavin had said, with a nod to Jinx, that one pretentious soubriquet in the house was more than enough.

  ‘I have no power,’ Random said. ‘It must be a mistake.’

  ‘Yes you have,’ said Jinx. ‘I can feel it. You made the Lost Boys follow you, right? And you use that little knife like a tooth. You flick it out like vampire fangs, like it’s part of you. You kill without even trying. That’s power... of a kind. You got to learn to control it.’

  Random made no answer, tinkering with Gavin’s mobile. He was filled with an eerie detachment, unable to believe that any of it really connecte
d to him, neither the Gift, nor Azmordis, nor Jinx’s apprehension, nor Gavin’s mockery. Pen had said he might be suffering from time lag, the shock of switching dimensions after so long. He didn’t feel he belonged in the present or the past: his mind planed, noting details without really taking them in. He pressed the numbers on the keypad, watching the screen light up, vaguely intrigued to find the future so... futuristic.

  Pen watched him with concern. They had rescued him – or he’d rescued himself – that was something she had aimed for. It should give them a breather, a moment to pause, recoup, feel conscious of achievement, but instead she felt only an increase of disquiet, of the sense of imminent danger which had pervaded their lives for too long. She didn’t actually like Random – you couldn’t like someone who’d done the things he’d done – but she didn’t think he was evil, not yet, not completely. They couldn’t give up on him, she couldn’t give up on him.

  He’d been rescued from the house; now, he had to be rescued from himself.

  Jinx left the forward drive of conversation to Pen and Gavin, muttered something about the loo, and slipped out in search of Hoover. She had a plan of her own and hoped the others would be too preoccupied to bother about her absence. As she closed the door, she heard Gavin asking about food in the world of the Past, and whether Random had managed to steal any good cooking...

  IN THE HALL, Jinx fumbled in the bag Pen had left on the table, looking for the keys to Number 7.

  ‘Hoover?’

  The dog was waiting by the door to the utility room, as though he knew what she was going to do.

  Together, they slipped behind the coats and into the quiet of the house next door. Jinx glanced over her shoulder once or twice, but no one seemed to have noticed her leave. In Bygone House she went down the steps to the lower ground floor, where the entrance to the kitchen should be. The dog dropped onto his haunches, looking alert.