Jerusalem Page 67

  They’d found Mrs. Gibbs a smouldering brazier left over from a market-trader’s nightmare, which both Handsome John and Reggie Bowler carried carefully between them, old rags wrapped around their hands. The deathmonger had called in at the ghost of the fishmonger’s, Perrit’s in Horsemarket, and had obtained fish-guts from a man that she referred to as “the Sheriff”. Handing the malodorous parcel, wrapped in newspaper, to Mrs. Gibbs across his counter, the fishmonger with the hook nose and the huge moustache had simply grunted “Devils, wiz it?”, to which Mrs. Gibbs responded with a nod and with a faintly weary “Arr” of affirmation.

  When the Dead Dead Gang and Mrs. Gibbs had made their way back to the section of the Attics that was the specific afternoon in 1959 where Phyllis had first chanced on Michael Warren, there was hardly anyone about. They saw the dream-self of a hard-faced woman in her forties, standing staring out in puzzlement across the endless sea of wood-framed apertures before she shook her head and wandered off down the arcade. She had red hands that looked like boiled bacon, so that Phyllis thought she might be somebody who did a lot of laundry. Also, she was in the nude. Her Bill and Reggie Bowler started smirking about this last detail until Phyllis told them to grow up, knowing full well they never would.

  Meanwhile, the deathmonger instructed the two bigger lads to set their pot of hot coals down within the entrance of the cobbled alley that led from the Attics off into the lanes of jumbled memory beyond, that Phyllis and her pals called the Old Buildings.

  “You can put it there, my dears. If this is where that awful creature stole the child from, you can bet that this is where he’ll bring him back to when he’s done with him. I’ve got me fish’s innards from off the Sheriff, and I think I’ve got a drop of scent tucked in a pocket of my apron, so that we’ll be ready for him when he comes.”

  Mrs. Gibbs’s aprons were almost as famous in Mansoul as was the deathmonger herself. She owned a pair of them, just as she had when she was still Downstairs: the white one with embroidered butterflies around the hem, for hatches, and the black one, for despatches. In this upper realm she wore her blinding pinafore adorned with butterflies if she were welcoming some just-departed soul up gasping through a floor-window into the Attics of the Breath, into a bigger life outside of time. Her black apron, in life, had been a plain one without any decoration, though from how it looked at present it would seem that Mrs. Gibbs had always thought of it as something more elaborate. Around its edge were scarab beetles picked out in green iridescent thread, Egyptian styli and Kohl-cornered eyes stitched in metallic gold. She only wore this one when someone needed seeing off, and Phyllis wondered how the deathmonger had known to put it on today. Most probably it was just something she’d felt in her water, in her dust, her atoms. You could always sort of tell when devils were about. There was that smell, and everyone felt quarrelsome and fed up with themselves.

  The six of them had waited there a while, lurking around the alley-mouth. Drowned Marjorie and little Bill had burgled a few lumps of slack out of the nearby dream of Wiggins’s coal-yard so that Mrs. Gibbs could keep her brazier going until Michael Warren and the fiend showed up, if they were ever going to. Phyllis and Handsome John stood leaning up against the window of The Snail Races, staring up at the unfolding diagrams of weather over the emporium, out through the glass panes of the arcade roof. Faceted clouds crumpled impossibly, traced in white lines upon a perfect, shimmering blue. Neither of the two youngsters spoke, and Phyllis wondered for a moment if John might not take her clammy hand. Instead he turned away and peered through the shop window at one of the decorated model snails, a white one with a red cross painted on its metal shell to make it look like a toy ambulance. She tried to keep the disappointment from her voice when John asked what she thought of it, and said she thought it wiz all right. Sometimes she wondered if it was her scarf of rabbits what put people off.

  They’d not been standing there for very long when Reggie Bowler, who’d gone wandering on his own along the hallway to the west, came haring back down the arcade excitedly, dodging between the fifty-foot-square apertures with one hand raised to hold his dented hat on and his long Salvation Army overcoat flapping about his ankles as he ran.

  “They’re comin’ out the sunset! I just seen ’em! Bugger me, that devil’s big.”

  Phyllis was squinting down the length of the great hall in the direction Reggie’s flailing sleeve had indicated, at the tangerine and bronze eruption of that evening’s sunset going on above the glass roof in the west. She could make out a flickering dot in silhouette against the riot of bloody light, a blackened paper scrap high in the upper reaches of the Attics that appeared to be becoming larger as it flew towards them from the future. Reggie had been right. She’d been too busy running when it dived towards them earlier to get a proper look at it, but this was certainly no minor imp.

  Reasoning that the devil might have had more time to study Phyllis and her friends than they’d had time to study it, she ordered everyone into the jitty so that they should not be recognised and give the game away.

  “Come on. Get in the alleyway and behind Mrs. Gibbs, so ’e don’t see us. Just leave everything to ’er.”

  Nobody seemed inclined to argue with this eminently sensible idea. By now the fiend had drifted closer so that its alarming size was more apparent and likewise its colouring of flashing red and green, as if a cup of salt had been thrown on a bonfire. Even Reggie Bowler made no protest when instructed to take shelter behind Mrs. Gibbs. He’d evidently reconsidered his original idea, which had been to somehow leap upon the demon’s back from hiding.

  Handsome John, surprisingly and gratifyingly, took Phyllis by one skinny arm and steered her to the safety of the jitty. He was looking back, the pink glow from the west upon his lean face and his wave of sandy hair. He frowned and creased the sooty and poetic smudge of shadow round his pale eyes, luminously grey like torch-beams playing over water.

  “Bloody hell, Phyll. It looks like a Jerry biplane coming down to buzz the trenches. Let’s get in the alley where it’s safe.”

  They sheltered breathless in the jitty entrance with their backs so flat against the red brick wall that Phyllis thought they might leave all their colours and their lines behind like tattoo transfers when they peeled themselves away. Her Bill was nearest to the corner, circumspectly poking out his ginger head and then retracting it, keeping an eye on the approaching demon’s progress. Mrs. Gibbs, positioned at the centre of the alley mouth and in full view of the enormous corridor, calmly continued tending to her fire with a bent poker, which had been inside the brazier when they’d found it. As she let the air between the sullen coals a blacksmith glow flared up to under-light her face, impassive, with its skin like autumn fruit. Bill called out from the row of children’s far end, trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice.

  “He’s circling in to land, and he looks horrible. He’s got horns, and his eyes are different colours.”

  Phyllis lifted one small hand and made the rabbit sign, her middle- and ring-fingers touched against her thumb to form the nose, her first and little fingers raised like ears. As quiet as rabbits in the grass the whole gang tiptoed forward stealthily to join Bill near the corner, from which vantage they could see more of the mile-wide Attics’ floor. Despite their advance warning, all of them except for Mrs. Gibbs jumped visibly when the infernal being finally came into view, drifting down slowly from above like an immense and lurid parrot-coloured blossom, the pyjama-clad child held fast in its sunburned arms.

  One of the creature’s legs uncurled beneath it with the leather boot’s toe pointed dancer-fashion, nimbly alighting on the pine boards in between the rows of sunken vats. For all of its apparent mass the monster landed almost silently, facing away from them with its bright tatters fluttering upward from the draught of the descent, in cockscomb red and poison apple green.

  The glamour that it wore was very like a man, albeit one some eight or nine feet tall. A leather priest’s hat hung between it
s shoulders from a cord tied underneath its bearded chin, revealing a long mane of curling russet hair from which protruded two horns, like a goat’s. From where she stood beside John, Phyllis couldn’t see its face, for which she was immensely grateful. She had never seen a devil this close to before, and frankly she was having enough trouble trying to cope with its upsetting atmosphere, without the added stress of thinking what she’d do if it should turn and look at her.

  With a surprising gentleness, the ragged fireball of coagulated ill intentions set down Michael Warren on the Attics’ floor before it. The poor little bugger stood there quaking in his striped pyjamas and his dressing gown, which looked the worse for wear since Phyllis had last seen it. There were small tears in the tartan fabric where the monster’s claws had evidently snagged, and on the collar and the shoulders were discoloured patches where it looked as if somebody had dripped battery acid. One spot was still smoking faintly. Poor kid, he looked scared to death and then scared back to life again. Although he stood so he was facing towards Phyllis and the jitty-mouth he clearly couldn’t take his eyes off of the devil looming over him, and so was yet to notice her.

  The thing seemed to be talking to the little boy, stooping towards the trembling infant with an air that looked as menacing as it was condescending. It was speaking in a voice too low to hear from where she stood, the gas-jet roaring of a forest fire ten miles away, but its intentions were transparent. Phyllis recognised the hunched, intimidating bully posture from a dozen Boroughs bruisers, although unlike them and contrary to everything her mother had once said to her, this bully didn’t look as if he’d turn out to be secretly a coward. Phyllis doubted that there could be anything much worse than him for him to be afraid of, and she wondered for the first time whether Mrs. Gibbs would be enough to deal with this.

  It had appeared to Phyllis, at that point, as though the rustling horror had suggested something awful to the toddler, who’d begun to back away, shaking his flaxen head. Whatever the proposal had involved, it didn’t look as though the fiend was in a mood to tolerate refusal. With its variegated foliage shivering threateningly it took one crouching step forward pursuing the retreating child, one callused hand raised to show off the sharpened ivory of its fingernails as if it meant to open Michael Warren like a pea-pod made of flannelette, and Phyllis Painter closed her eyes. She had expected the next thing she heard to be a bubbling scream, like a coursed hare. Instead, it was the reassuring cradle-creak of Mrs. Gibbs’s voice.

  “Not that way, dear. You come towards me. Don’t let that old fright tell you what’s what.”

  Cautiously, Phyllis let her eyelids part to feathered, blurry chinks.

  She’d been surprised to find that Michael Warren was not dead, or, anyway, no deader than he had been a few moments back. The little boy had by now noticed Phyllis and the gang, alerted by the interjection of the deathmonger. He’d ceased to back towards the far wall of the vast arcade and was now edging to one side in an attempt to come towards them and the alleyway, while still giving the fiend as wide a berth as possible.

  The devil stood stock-still for an exaggerated instant, then turned slowly until it was facing Mrs. Gibbs and the five cowering children. Every one of them except the deathmonger had drawn a sharp breath at this first glimpse of its archetypal features, in which utter evil was expressed so perfectly that it became a horrible cartoon, grotesque and terrifying to the point where it was almost comical, although not quite. Its face was a boiled mask on which the red-brown brows and whiskers drifted in a thick chemical steam. Its ears rose up to curling points but, unlike those of elves in picture-story books, in real life this looked sickening and deformed. The horns were dirty white with rusty smears around the base that might have been dried blood, and, as her Bill had pointed out, its eyes were different colours. They had different stories in them, almost different personalities. The red one radiated torture-chamber interludes, thousand-year grudges and campaigns of merciless attrition, while the green one told of doomed affairs, bruised childhoods and of passions fiercer, more exhausting, than malaria. Together they were like a pair of painted bull’s-eyes and were fixed, unwaveringly, on Mrs. Gibbs.

  The deathmonger did not appear to be impressed. She held the creature’s gaze while speaking almost casually to Michael Warren.

  “That’s a good boy. You go round him and you come to me. Don’t worry, dear. I’ll see he doesn’t hurt you.”

  Clearly very much afraid despite the deathmonger’s encouragements, the little squirt (who, Phyllis Painter had already made her mind up, was a bit soft) nonetheless heeded her cue to make a break for it. He scampered in a wide arc to the devil’s left and everybody else’s right, so scared of getting close to his tormenter that his route would take him up as far as The Snail Races before he came doubling back towards the alley and his rescuers. Phyllis and her four cohorts had unpeeled themselves off of the jitty’s red brick wall and shuffled timidly to form a ragged semi-circle, some feet safely back from Mrs. Gibbs. Fiddling in nervous agitation with her rabbit necklace, Phyllis’s attention darted between Michael and the demon, so she’d caught the moment when the fiend’s appalling glare swept sideways to take note of the escaping toddler and then returned with a renewed vindictiveness to settle once again on the old woman in the scarab apron, standing prodding at her brazier. The things the creature’s gaze had promised Mrs. Gibbs were things that Phyllis didn’t want to name or think about. Its viscous voice was like a burning sulphur treacle when it spoke, purple and toxic.

  “Oh. You’ll see that I don’t hurt him, will you? And how will you manage that, exactly, from the septic depths of my digestive system?”

  Phyllis, if she’d still been able to, would almost certainly have wet herself. It had said it was going to eat them, though not in as many words. Not only eat them but digest them, their immortal essences still conscious in the scalding darkness of a monster’s bowel. At just that moment Phyllis had been on the verge of telling the arch-devil that it could have Michael Warren and do what it wanted with him, if it didn’t wolf them down and turn them into demon-poo. The deathmonger was made of sterner stuff, however. She had stared into whatever abattoir-cum-jungle chaos seethed behind the nightmare’s mismatched irises, and as yet had not even blinked. Her voice was level, unaffected as she answered.

  “I’m a deathmonger, my dear, and we know all the oldest remedies. We’ve even got a remedy for you.”

  What happened next was one of those things which occurred so fast that nobody could tell the precise order of events until much later, when they’d all gone over it a dozen times. Mrs. Gibbs had been holding a soft handful of fish-offal out of sight behind her back, and now she brought it forth to fling on the hot coals in a dramatic, spraying arc. The rancid hearts and lights and livers hissed and sizzled as they melted, but the deathmonger was already at work retrieving from her apron a small tear-shaped bottle of what looked like cheap scent bought from bottom Woolworth’s, or the wistful dream of some. Removing first its cap with practised ease, the deathmonger inverted this above her brazier so that its contents rained down on the glowing stones. Steam billowed up in an expanding column that smelled absolutely vile, like wild flowers growing in a filthy toilet bowl. Even for Phyllis, who had long since ceased to notice the perfume of her own rabbit-garland, this was an eye-watering experience. The fiend’s reaction to the rich and singular bouquet, though, was much worse.

  It arched, spine rippling like a nauseous cat, and all its coloured rags stood up on end in flattened triangles, as though they were the spines of a toy hedgehog. The infernal regent spat and shuddered, and the edges of its image started curdling biliously, blotched molten white as with a ruined photograph, afflicted by an acne of burning magnesium. On contact with the noxious fumes from the deathmonger’s brazier, the devil’s substance seemed to become vaporous itself, crumpling to a dense and heavy gas in writhing billows that retained the creature’s basic shape yet had about their texture something of the intricate and
craggy look you found in cauliflower. As if a gas-main had been burst, this nine-foot cloud of poison fog erupted upwards suddenly, became a red-green pillar of smoke hundreds of yards high. Phyllis had watched with ghastly fascination as the towering cumulus had seemed to knit itself together in a new configuration, so enormous and so complicated that she couldn’t tell at first what she was looking at.

  Oh blimey. Flippin’ heck, it had been terrible.

  It had been a gigantic dragon, gaudy red and green glints flashing from a million scales as big as high-hat cymbals. Sitting lewdly naked there astride the broad back of the roaring, stamping juggernaut there was a being which, despite its horrifying size, had the proportions of a baby or a dwarf. A snake-tail thrashed behind it, although Phyllis couldn’t tell if this belonged to the infuriated mount or to its rider. She supposed that they were both the same thing in the end. Its heads, for it had three of them, were left to right those of a maddened bull, a raging homicidal tyrant in a ruby crown, and a black ram with rolling eyes as if in rut. It held in one fist an iron lance, high as the Eiffel Tower and caked thick with dried blood and excrement, as if it had run something through from bum to brain. A banner flew from this, green with a red device that was all arrows, curls and crosses, and the agonised and furious fiend pounded the lance’s hilt against the Attics’ floor in screeching, bellowing exasperation. Worst of all, in Phyllis’s opinion, had been the thing’s feet as it crouched there on its prismatic, smouldering steed. The hell-king’s calves and ankles tapered gruesomely to pink and bristling stalks, from which sprouted the webbed feet of some monstrous duck. The webbing, stretched between the yellowed digits, was an unappealing grey with white discoloured patches as though from some waterfowl-disease, and it made Phyllis queasy just to look at it.