The Devil's Apprentice Read online

  ‘This could take a while,’ said Jinx.

  The door-knob made her fingers prickle, but she knew that was a witch-reaction and did her best to ignore it. She opened the door, very cautiously, just a couple of inches, waited about ten seconds, then closed it again. A short pause, and she repeated the process. Again. And again. And each time Hoover sniffed at the gap, then showed no further interest. Jinx was growing impatient; she didn’t want to be too long, in case the others came looking for her, but this couldn’t be hurried. She never opened the door enough to see anything, but occasional sounds came through – the rattle of crockery, the whistling hiss of a giant kettle, a bubbling, gurgling noise like a dragon in a soup cauldron. There were smells, too, not all of them culinary, but she clung on to the belief that what she would find through the kitchen door would be, in some shape or form, a kitchen.

  Bartlemy Goodman had once told her the kitchen is the heart of a house, and if Pen was right, and the house functioned like a living organism, then surely it should have a heart. Or at least a stomach. And he would be in a kitchen, however he had managed to get there; she should have realised it long before.

  The moment came when Hoover barked once, short and sharp.

  ‘This one?’ said Jinx. ‘Okay... Here we go.’

  She pushed the door open wide.

  Beyond, she saw a square tunnel retreating into the distance until it ended in what appeared to be a blank wall. There were huge double doors on her left but no other exit and the long passageway looked like a burrow to nowhere.

  She fixed a wedge under the door and Hoover lay down in the gap, adopting a pose reminiscent of the lions in Trafalgar Square.

  ‘Stay on guard,’ Jinx told him, adding, in a voice intentionally loud: ‘If Smeagol-Stiltz turns up and tries to close the door, you can eat him.’

  Beyond the Doors

  Gormenghast

  SHE STEPPED OVER the dog into the corridor, waiting a minute to see if anything happened. But, as far as she could tell, she was still Jinx. Perhaps this was a magical dimension. She found she was fiddling with her ring, and, glancing down, saw the snake’s eyes had changed to a smoky mauve.

  She had no idea what that meant.

  ‘Here goes,’ she said again. She thrust the double doors open – it took considerable effort – and went through.

  It was a kitchen, as she had guessed, but a kitchen the size of a small cathedral, hung with foetid gloom and as busy as a corpse full of maggots. Ovens throbbed and belched, spits turned, fireplaces coughed out smoke, huge pots of soup or stew heaved and bubbled like volcanic pools. Flamelight from open hearth and closed stove flickered redly along the blades of saw-edged knives and glinted in the sides of those pans clean enough to glint. There were people everywhere – chefs and sous-chefs, menials and venials, scullions and rapscullions – slicing, stirring, basting, picking their noses or their teeth, preoccupied with something or nothing; but all of them completely ignored Jinx. The only person to pay her any attention was a dwarf with withered legs and impossibly long simian arms, who dropped suddenly in front of her like a lemur from a jungle canopy and cackled in her face. She produced a grimace like a kabuki mask, sticking out her tongue and hissing. The manikin flinched and swung away.

  Spanning the breadth of the room was a broad wooden beam, corkscrewed with age, or heat, or damp, until it appeared more like a twisted branch than anything man-made. It was festooned with strings of onions, grizzled bunches of herbs, and strange knobbly utensils, and slung over it not far from Jinx were two limp bundles, like part-filled sacks. There was a brief, terrifying instant when she realised they were human and thought they were dead, perhaps hung there prior to cooking, then she saw they were either unconscious or asleep. On the nearest, nostril and lip rippled as a snore issued from somewhere within. Relief flooded through her; what she was seeing here was fantastic and grotesque, but not gruesome.

  Not yet.

  Her foot struck something and she ducked down, peering under an adjacent table to see what it was. More inert bodies, a whole row of them, vibrating with the sluggish breathing of drunken coma. The kitchen dripped grease and reeked of roasting and charring flesh, adding to the impression of some infernal region, but here the strongest smell was that of stale beer, seeping from greyish pores and exhaling from slack mouth and gurgling windpipe. Jinx stood up hastily, knocking her head on the table’s edge, and backed away.

  She was making her way through the room, dodging the workers and trying not to tread on any more bodies, when she found herself in a sudden oasis of calm, an area of the kitchen beyond the roar of the ovens where menials did not venture and even the smells seemed to falter, shrinking away as if in awe. On a special table all by itself stood a cake. A cake two yards long and a foot high, robed in a thick mantle of icing, the ridges of hidden layering showing along the sides like laminations in a cliff-face. But what was extraordinary about it was the decoration. Every inch of the top was covered in a vast sugar sculpture of what seemed to be a city, though Jinx decided, on looking more closely, that it was actually a building or complex of buildings. It was done with an obsessive attention to detail – towers and turrets, spires and steeples, battlements and balustrades, pillars, cupolas, gargoyles, all were exquisitely moulded, daubed with edible colorants, adorned with ivy and grasses of desiccated coconut tinted in different greens. At the centre, the six tallest chimney-stacks supported six candles in gilded holders. A man was bending over it, deft fingers daubing and tinting. A very fat man with a small concentration-frown on his large face, smooth silvery hair, pale eyelashes. He wore the white coat of a chef, spotless as virgin snow even in that place. His hat had been removed and was perched crookedly on top of a jar of dried fruits.

  Jinx knew that when he looked up and saw her his eyes would be forget-me-not blue.

  She waited for a little while, watching him work. Wondering how long he had been there, and whether he had stopped to eat, or sleep.

  ‘Barty?’ she said at last. ‘Uncle Barty?’

  He looked up.

  ‘Good heavens!’ he said. ‘If it isn’t Hazel. You’ve changed your hair. How lovely... how lovely to see you...’

  There might have been many options for Jinx’s real name – Erminwolf, or Morticia, or anything beginning with X – but not Hazel. Hazel was a country-girl name, shy and dowdy and slightly dull. She must make him swear never, ever to tell the others...

  ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ she said.

  ‘You’re so grown up.’ He was smiling gently, taking in the body-piercing, the black-and-white makeup, the porcupine-quill eyelashes.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said, indicating the cake. ‘It’s the most amazing cake I’ve ever seen. What is it meant to be? I mean, where...?’

  ‘It’s this house,’ he said simply.

  ‘All that – is one house?’

  ‘In Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Don Fabrizio says it’s rather vulgar to know how many rooms your house has.’

  You could say that of Number 7, thought Jinx.

  ‘It’s for his lordship’s birthday,’ Bartlemy continued. ‘He’s six years old. The sixth birthday is very important – the transition from infancy to childhood. I’m hoping the Countess will be pleased with my cake.’

  ‘Is this a real place?’ Jinx asked. ‘It doesn’t seem real. I still know I’m me, for one thing. At least, I think so. Is it a magical dimension?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘It’s a place in someone’s imagination. All magical dimensions come from the imagination, of course – from primitive beliefs, legends, folk-tales. But once in a while you get an individual whose imagination is so powerful he can create an entire world all by himself. His own reality. That’s what this is. It isn’t real as such.’

  ‘We should go,’ said Jinx. ‘The cake looks finished to me.’

  ‘I must just add a few more details...’

  ‘If you keep adding a bit more, and a bit more, it will never be done,’ said
Jinx. ‘Anyway, it looks perfect. More would be too much. We do have to leave. You’re needed... elsewhere.’

  ‘Is it urgent?’ he said.

  ‘It might be.’ She glanced towards his feet. ‘Did they give you any shoes?’

  ‘Slippers,’ he said, showing her a kind of moccasin whose pointed toe curled up like something out of the Arabian Nights.

  ‘Good,’ said Jinx. ‘I’d hate you to walk across this floor barefoot.’

  She took his hand, and led him carefully through the obstacle-course of the kitchen.

  London, twenty-first century

  IN 7A, THE doorbell rang. After Jasveer’s accident and the advent of Seth Kayser the sound had become almost ominous; Quorum had just gone out, Eve wasn’t due back for hours, no one was expected. The insistent brrrrrr! intruded on them like a warning. With no butler available to answer the door Pen felt the dilemma devolved on her; she tried to see the visitor out of a window but the porch screened whoever it was from view. She mouthed: ‘Should I go?’ though nobody outside was likely to hear her speak.

  Gavin said: ‘No,’ and Random said: ‘Why not?’ and after a few moments the bell rang again. It couldn’t possibly sound more demanding but it did. Two of the things it is hardest to resist in the modern world are the doorbell and the phone. Pen tucked the Teeth into the pocket of her sweatshirt by way of protection and went to answer it.

  It was Seth Kayser. She had known it would be, of course; there was a grim inevitability about his arrival, just there, just then, when Jinx and Hoover seemed to have disappeared (perhaps they had gone for a walk), and Gavin had lost the stun-gun, and all she had was a set of dentures growling in a muffled tone from her hip.

  The lawyer looked different, as if exhibiting yet another incarnation of himself, somehow leaner and tougher, less human, more demon. Instead of a suit he wore a black leather jacket and faded grey jeans with the sort of rips that might have resulted from a rather stylish sword-fight. Pen was fair and Random was an albino but Seth Kayser had the bloodless pallor of a vampire. His hair shone unnaturally bright in the fleeting sunlight.

  ‘I’ve come for the boy,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t come in,’ said Pen.

  So might Gandalf have said: ‘You shall not pass!’ on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. So might Marshal Pétain have declared: ‘Ils ne passeront pas’ at Verdun.

  It didn’t do her much good.

  ‘You can’t stop me,’ said the man who had been Cesare.

  He thrust her aside lightly, with the casual strength of a superhero – except there are no superheroes, Pen thought. Only supervillains. She clamped a hand over the Teeth, murmuring sotto voce: ‘Not yet. Not yet.’ Once he saw the Teeth he could not fail to remember...

  In the sitting room, Seth Kayser said to Random: ‘You’re the one. Come with me,’ and held out his hand.

  Pen and Gavin were silent. They realised that they couldn’t intervene, not at this moment, though all their past efforts came to nothing. This particular choice wasn’t theirs to make.

  Random felt the same compulsion he had experienced when he followed them through the door. Fate leading him on. But this wasn’t a ginger-haired girl and a dark-skinned boy, both too clean for comfort – this was a man with the face of a wicked angel and the poise and elegance of a steel blade. He walked into the room as if he owned it; Random sensed he would walk into any room that way. He had the aura of someone who is capable of anything, yet who can effortlessly maintain control over that potential – a wolf in sheepdog’s clothing, a snake who can charm the charmer. This was someone he had wanted to be, in the Home long ago when he had fed the bully rabbit-droppings, or when he roamed the streets of a vanished city, a jackal in a world of predators far bigger and more deadly. This was Ghost, grown into a man, come back to guide him – or to haunt him.

  He looked at the proffered hand but didn’t take it, though his own were no longer dirty. He found he was thinking of Mags, and Cherub, and Tomkin, wondering how they had fared, and if he would forget them one day, and wishing he could see them again...

  ‘I cannot give you everything you want,’ said the guide, as if reading his mind, ‘but I can teach you how to take it.’ And with those words he seemed to be offering Random the world that he had lost, the friends who had gone into the dark, the hopes which had withered or failed...

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Random said. Those I loved are all dead, centuries dead; what right have I to call them back?

  Suddenly he knew that just because the newcomer was someone he might have been, someone he might have wanted to be, that was why he didn’t trust him. He knew too much about himself, and none of it was good.

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ he said, adding politely, if not quite truthfully: ‘I like it here.’

  ‘Come with me.’

  Now, the proffered hand held a knife.

  The blade was as thin as a sliver of moonlight and sharp enough to cut the wind. Random reached for his flick-knife, then remembered that it was upstairs in the room where he had slept. They had told him he wouldn’t need it now. Gavin moved to help him – how neither of them knew – but the knife-point was at Random’s stomach. He could feel the touch of it through his clothes, hardly more than a pinprick; he flattened his belly, shrinking away from it, trying not to breathe. Pen, overlooked for the minute, brought out the Teeth.

  ‘Wait!’ she whispered. If Cesare was startled his arm might jerk and the knife penetrate inadvertently...

  ‘You and I will leave,’ he told Random. ‘If no one tries to prevent us, no one will get hurt. Understand?’

  Random nodded. He wasn’t worth anyone getting hurt, even himself. He knew that.

  Seth Kayser seized him from behind. The knife shifted to his throat, a movement so swift the arm blurred. Pen wondered if now was the right time – if there was any right time. She had the element of surprise, and the Teeth. But she didn’t feel heroic, only horribly scared.

  She said: ‘Cesare!’

  He swung round, still gripping Random, his auburn brows drawn into a frown. Groping for recollection. It was so long since he had been Cesare, so long...

  ‘Do you remember me?’ If she could distract him for a few vital seconds – if the knife-hand would drop just a fraction...

  ‘Who...? Penni? Penella... you were Penella...’

  ‘Do you remember?’ she repeated. The Teeth leaped from her hand.

  But the man she had known had been mortal, vulnerable, weakened from the aftermath of poison. This was a demon with a demon’s powers and reflexes faster than thought. He flung out his left hand, cried: ‘Néfia! Estarré!’ The Teeth locked in mid-spring, thudding onto the carpet.

  The knife stayed at Random’s throat, cold against his skin.

  ‘I remember.’ There was a quiver in Seth Kayser’s voice, but his breathing had barely quickened. ‘I still have the scar. My lord told me to kill you, but I was reluctant. You were so young, so innocent, so devoted. I could have used you.’ There was bewilderment in his eyes for all his arrogance. ‘You are still young.’

  ‘Work it out!’ said Pen.

  She thought: He doesn’t understand about the house. He doesn’t understand how it works...

  But it didn’t help them.

  Seth Kayser backed into the hall, dragging his captive with him. The front door was still ajar the way he had left it when he came in. He was going to leave, taking Random, and there was nothing they could do at all...

  Gavin glanced towards the rear of the house. There are few situations when you find yourself wishing for a velociraptor, but this was one of them.

  What they got was Jinx. Jinx emerging from the utility room, Hoover at her side – Jinx looking somehow different, with an aura of satisfaction about her, a kind of sparkle. Jinx never sparkled.

  She said: ‘Hi.’

  Behind her was a man they’d never seen before. A very fat man with blue eyes and an expression of mild kindliness. He wore a white coat which gave him a fa
intly medical air, though there was nothing else medical about him. They had no time to wonder who he was or what he was doing there. He stepped forward, his bland blue gaze scanning the room until it came to rest on Seth Kayser, Random, the knife. The mildness and kindliness of his face did not change. He looked like the sort of person who might say: ‘Well, well,’ or ‘Dear me.’

  He said: ‘Dear me.’

  Seth Kayser’s features thinned to a predatory sharpness. ‘Who are you?’ he said – but he said it almost as if he knew.

  ‘This is my house,’ said the fat man.

  Pen started; Gavin’s mouth opened – and shut.

  ‘Your house?’ said the predator.

  ‘My house,’ the fat man affirmed calmly. ‘You may have been invited in, but not by me. And now I am ordering you to leave.’

  ‘I’m already leaving.’

  ‘Without the boy.’

  ‘He goes with me,’ said Seth Kayser, ‘or he dies. You choose. And if that dog moves a whisker nearer, I’ll open his throat now.’

  Like I did with Cullen, thought Random. Maybe that’s how retribution works. Oddly, he wasn’t afraid. He’d gone past being afraid of dying a long time ago...

  Like the witch-girl with the child, thought Gavin, remembering the blood-spatter on his clothes...

  Jinx grasped a hunk of Hoover’s fur, but it wasn’t necessary.

  The fat man said: ‘How will you explain that to your master?’

  The Fellangel’s face thinned and sharpened still further. He no longer looked human: his pallor had become a white mask with a flame-flicker behind the eyes.

  ‘He told you to bring the boy back alive,’ said the fat man. ‘I doubt if he would thank you for his head.’

  In the silence there was a wrestling of wills, challenge meeting challenge, bluff defying bluff.