The Murdstone Trilogy (5 page)

The clerk’s voice spoke, and his hand wrote, the names of all that rolled below them. Philip knew, with a dreamer’s certainty, that every word was being inscribed indelibly on his memory, hard-wired to his brain. He felt consumed by an insatiable happiness.

His eyes tracked the course of a river; silver, then milky blue, then turquoise. It enfolded three walled cities before it vanished, beyond a mighty cataract, into what seemed a limitless forest. But this too passed, and a rich undulating plain appeared, patchworked with fields and meadows, woodlands and thatched hamlets and greens where children might have played but did not.

Some immeasurable time later, a darkness appeared in the approaching distance, spanning the horizon. At first, Philip thought that the clerk’s Greme magic had rolled the world into nightfall; then as it drew nearer, he realized that he was looking at a vast, black, flat-bellied cloud. It cast onto the land below it a shadow that was an utter absence of light.

The Thule of Morl
, Pocket’s voice announced.
This is as far as we go. We don’t know the Layout beyond here any more.

The slow unfurling of the world stopped.

Peering ahead, Philip now saw that a mesh of perfectly straight roads spread from the darkness out onto the plain. Along it and across it columns of what looked, from his height, like termites moved steadily and unceasingly.
There were many fires, but the termites passed heedless through them.

Swelts
, the Greme’s voice said, and the word lowered the temperature of the dream.

The Realm now reversed its scrolling, and the Thule receded. Philip had not been aware of any loss of altitude, but they were closer to the surface now. He saw details that he had not seen earlier. On the plain, there were smudges where whole villages had been extinguished as if by a gigantic and filthy thumb. The forest was scarred by furrows of toppled trees. Of the three walled cities, two were derelict, their towers topless, their ramparts broached. Where the mountains plunged into the sea, he saw in isolated coves the blackened ribs and spines of burned boats. The jumbled stones on the surface of Farrin were wrecked townships, perhaps razed by some spasm that had rocked the plateau.

Someone spoke from the far distance, and Philip recognized the voice as his own.

‘What happened?’

Instantly he turned liquid and was syphoned downwards. When he was himself again the world had gone. He somehow knew that he was back in a subterranean chamber. The old cracked voice was still mumbling gibberish. Pocket was talking eighteen to the dozen and the pen was flying across the paper and the ink was again desperately chasing the words. The story that they recounted Philip saw unfold.

He saw the fierce grim ritual in which the bewitched
Bradnor Lux rejected and cast out his infant son, Cadrel. He saw the casket containing the Amulet of Eneydos withdrawn from the Throne Room, carried aloft between two ranks of a thousand black candles.

He witnessed Cadrel’s exiled childhood among the moth farmers of the Furthest Hills.

He watched the shapeshifter, Trover Mellwax, in the form of a giant mucilaginous toad, steal the Amulet from the Guardians who lay stunned by his narcotic breath.

He saw the blond youth Morl Morlbrand arrive at the College of Thaumaturgy and stand gazing at the inscriptions above the ancient doors.

He watched a caravan of tall, long-necked animals, their heads hooded against the whirling sand, cross the Shand’r Ga Desert under a mantle of stars. Glowing tent-like structures swayed on their backs. Somewhere in the night, dogs barked.

He watched, helplessly, the brutish slaughter in the Furthest Hills.

He saw young Cadrel’s wanderings, watched him cross the sun-freckled floor of the mapless forest. He saw the youth’s slow awakening under the tutelage of Orberry Volenap, his winning of the Lost Sword of Cwydd Harel.

He watched Bradnor Lux carried aboard the black-draped barge and depart on his last journey accompanied by keening Shades.

He saw Morl again, no longer young, clad in the green and silver necromantick cloak. Turning towards him, his
eyes remote as a fish’s, set deep in a bone-hard face. The mouth moving out of phase with the words:
Give it to me! Give it to me!

Philip’s mortal body groaned aloud in its sleep when the Megrum uncoiled its endless length from its spiral cave, eeling towards him and spilling toxic drool from its multiple banks of teeth.

He saw star-crossed love take root and ripen; he watched Cadrel take beautiful Mesmira, half-sister to Morl, in his arms.

He watched a rising blood-red sun slowly illuminate the impatient host of Morl’s battle-hungry Swelts, their war-axes and serrated javelins raised to greet the dawn. He saw Cadrel and GarBellon the Sage survey the enemy from a vertiginous jut of rock, GarBellon’s white beard restless in the morn-breeze.

He saw a screen of blank and perfect blue.

He watched it for several long moments, perhaps hoping that it was some kind of intermission or commercial break. He noticed that little dark specks swam in the blue; then, in a rush of comprehension, realized that they were birds and that he was staring at his own world’s sky. He felt his weight return and knew that he sat on grass with his back against a stone, awake.

He suffered a momentary though unbearable sense of loss, as if he had died while fully conscious. Apart from that, he felt fine. There was a roll-up between his fingers, which, eventually, he lit.

Occasionally, in his writing, Philip Murdstone made use of dreams as a narrative device, or to suggest that rather dim characters led richly articulate lives when they were unconscious.

The fact was, though, that Philip himself did not dream; or if he did – and he had been assured that everybody did – his dreams never survived, could never be recalled. He awoke every day a blank page or perhaps palimpsest. He was secretly ashamed of this, thinking it a sort of disability.

Once, when he was still teaching English as a Foreign Language in Hove, a dating agency had matched him with a woman whose name was (or perhaps wasn’t) Sonya. He had taken her to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, where she’d proved adept with chopsticks. Sonya had spent the better part of the evening vividly recounting her dreams, which were long, elaborate, and drenched in suppressed eroticism. He’d had trouble keeping his end up, and had resorted to inventing the kind of thing he thought she might like to hear. He had not done very well; he simply
wasn’t much good at imagining the poetic non-sequiturs that dreams, it seemed, consisted of. Which is probably why his editors were always trying to trim them from his stories, and why he never saw Sonya again. (A year later, he learned that she had abandoned social work and gone off to be a pole-dancer in Lapland. Or was it a lap-dancer in Poland? He couldn’t remember which, nor – despite eating a deal of grilled cheese at bedtime – had he been able to dream of her in either role.)

So he was peculiarly ill-equipped for understanding what had happened to him up on the moor. Back in his dusky parlour, he fumbled at the experience like an ape looking for the edible parts of a digital camera.

For one thing, he couldn’t have reached the Wringers much before four thirty. He’d then dreamed, experienced, whatever, an incredibly detailed epic spanning something like twenty years. When he’d woken up and looked at his watch it had told him that it was four thirty-five. Then there was the fact that, despite Denis’s evil ale, he’d felt as fresh as a daisy. Still did, actually. Sort of spring-cleaned.

But what kept him immobile in his armchair was that the dream was still there. And not in his ordinary memory, either. The slightest shift in his concentration – nothing more than turning his eyeballs to the side, really – brought it up in perfect sequence and bright detail. The voice, the pictures, the alien but comprehensible writing, all seemed to have taken up residence in a district of his mind that he had never visited before. A district he hadn’t
known was there. He remembered understanding, in the dream, that this was happening, but that awareness was itself part of the dream, so, therefore … This line of thought petered out.

He looked at the dream again. It was as easy as clicking on a mouse. There was the speeding hand and coursing inkage of Pocket Wellfair. His light husky voice.
Click
. Gone.
Click
. Back again.

Christ.

Was it possible, Philip wondered, to become fully schizophrenic in less than five minutes while taking an innocent nap on a May afternoon? If so, it seemed deeply unfair. Surely there should be some warning, a bit of a build-up: the odd voice from inside the bathroom cabinet, a brief glimpse of an archangel in Tesco, that sort of thing.

Yet he didn’t feel mad. Far from it. He knew who and where he was, although, come to think of it, he couldn’t remember how he’d got from the Wringers back to his house. But he knew, for example, that the things at the ends of his legs were his feet, and that if he chose to waggle them they would waggle. There they went. He knew that if he wanted to he could go to the kitchen and make a cup of tea and not get lost. So he did.

Then the thought struck him that Pocket and Morl and the rest of them might not be in his head if he were absorbed in something else, so he took his cup across the lane, stood it on one of the gateposts, rolled a cigarette and tried to lose himself in the familiar but ever-changing vista.

Sheep Nose Tor was still edged with gold, but Beige Willie was aubergine now. From the dell a sheep began to bleat, then changed its mind. Tardy rooks drifted across the evening sky that was now a nameless blue hung with gauzy swags of amber cloud. Philip sipped tea, inhaled sweet smoke; then, cautiously, let his mind slip sideways.
Click
.

Oh shit,
Swelts
! Hell’s teeth, what ugly bastards!
Click
. Come on,
click, click
!

Gone. God!

His forehead seeped dew. His fear was as physical as the need to pee. He went back to the cottage.

Halfway through emptying his bladder he understood.

He conjured up Minerva’s purple paradigm of the fantasy novel and laid it, like a transparency, over his unsought-for vision.

The two matched. Up to a point. The point at which the dream, call it that, had simply stopped, incomplete. It was all there, though: the exiled prince, the quest, the amulet, the greybeards; all the old hokum that featured in those dire tomes downstairs. Except that Pocket Wellfair’s tale had a sort of, well,
authenticity
. The word was both absurd and absolutely appropriate.

He zipped up and flushed, stood immobile listening to the cistern reluctantly refilling itself. Then, not really wanting to, feeling in fact an eerie absence of self-will, he went to his study, the mean little room that Mr Gammon had called the Guest Bedroom.

He sat down on his B&Q orthopaedic office chair. The enormousness – and, for that matter, the enormity – of what he was about to do paralysed him. Eventually, however, he turned on the desk lamp and his PC. He settled the wayward cursor onto the Word icon. When the terrifying white page came up he hesitated briefly, then pressed Ctrl B and Ctrl I and typed:

He wrote without pause for nine hours, then fell asleep where he sat. When he awoke he went downstairs and drank a glass of water. He smoked a cigarette. It did not strike him as odd that he felt no hunger. He returned to his computer and stabbed the space-bar to relight it. (His first PC had had an animated screensaver thing: increasingly complex, multi-coloured pipework, like psychedelic plumbing. He’d watched it for long periods of time. It was peaceful, in a rather hectic way. He missed it. Why had it gone?)

When the text reappeared he carried on and did not cease writing for a further six and a half hours.

It was more or less a simple process of transcription. Pocket Wellfair’s script swarmed up from the bottom of the screen and Philip’s flying fingers turned it into English, line by line. A lifelong peer-and-peck typist, he was at first profoundly surprised that he could touch-type using all eight fingers and both thumbs. When Pocket’s upscrolling
words left him uncertain, he merely clicked his brain-mouse and described the images that unreeled for him. He did not pause or tut when clichés appeared on the screen. He did not stumble over the outlandish names or pointless apostrophes. It seemed to him that when his fingers faltered the text ran ahead and led them on. There was none of the finicky editing that was a large part of his normal writing process. Not that he was aware of any of this, or anything else. He had forgotten who he was.

Nothing. The words ran out. The screen filled with a pure and simple blue in which a few black pixels floated. Philip had known it would, but he stabbed the Page Down key nevertheless. Nothing happened. He switched to the new part of his brain, but it wasn’t there. He’d known it wouldn’t be, but he grieved for it anyway. He grieved for it bitterly, like a miser watching his money burn.

Denis served up a pint and a pitying look.

‘No offence, Phil? But you look like shite?’

‘Thanks, Denis.’

‘No worries.’

‘What?’

‘No worries?’

‘Oh, right.’

For two nights and three days he’d laboured, but he was no nearer finding an end to Pocket Wellfair’s tale than he had been when the monitor turned blue. Minerva’s purple blueprint, which he now studied with rabbinical intensity, suggested what should come next but offered no navigational aids as to how to get there.

It was obvious that, despite the intervention of the Sage, Cadrel must have lost the battle with Morl’s hideous minions. Murdstone had, after all, seen Morl’s dark Thule with his own eyes. Sort of.

But how had the battle been lost? How had Morl prevailed against the power of GarBellon’s sorcery? And had Cadrel survived? Was he once again a fugitive, or was he
perhaps held captive in one of Morl’s non-dimensions? Had Morl at last gained possession of the Amulet of Eneydos? Probably not, because … Well, just because, somehow. So where the bloody hell was it?

These whirling and intertangled riddles had brought him to the suburbs of madness; but what threatened him with a one-way trip to its centre was the fact that he was asking himself such questions in the first place.

He watched the bar fill up and become almost festive. It was, he realized, Friday. People from as far away as Bishop’s Writhing and Tormenton had come to sample Denis’s avant-garde menu. The waitresses, Zoë and Bernice, scuttled back and forth, hunched, beads of perspiration on their young moustaches. He noted, with a slurred objectivity, that the waistband of Bernice’s thong was seven or eight centimetres above the rear of her jeans which, apparently, contained three buttocks. With each drink his vision became more telescopic. In terrible close-up he saw varnished nails pull heads from prawns braised in tequila, watched greasy tongues tease ostrich fibres from false teeth.

Late in the evening, through a gap in the throng, he spied the Ancients sitting against the wall with their twin brothers. By closing one eye he made the twins disappear. He made the hazardous journey across the room and sat down.

After five minutes or so Edgar said, ‘Orright, then?’

‘Fine.’

‘Several few in tonight,’ Leon said.

Without turning his head towards Philip, Edgar said, ‘You looks rough as a badger’s arse, maister, don’t mind I sane so.’

‘Jus’ bit tired. Work. You know.’

Leon said, ‘Us had the red snapper. Tez like a big bleddy goldfish. Orright, though. Fair bit a meat on un.’

‘Right,’ Philip said.

After a noisy pause Edgar said, ‘Writer’s block agen, izzut?’

‘Well, not zactly. Jus’, well, you know. Smatter of fact, yes.’ He drank, burped, set his glass down carefully on the distressed oak and cast-iron table.

The Ancients drank, simultaneously, three centimetres of Guinness.

‘I was wunring,’ Philip said.

‘Ah?’

‘Was up at the Wringers, other day. Jus’ walking about, you know? And I, er, well. I’ve read the legends, nachrally. In books and so forth. Lot’v nonsense, I dare say. But I was wunring if there were other stories. Local knowledge sort of thing. You know.’

‘Ah.’

When a full minute had passed Philip said, ‘An I thaw to myself, I thaw, if anyone’s sure to know, id be you two gennelmen.’

Edgar’s gaze settled on something beyond Philip’s left shoulder, Leon’s on something beyond Philip’s right.

‘About the Wringers.’

The Ancients drank, wiped foam from their upper lips with the heels of their thumbs.

‘Ah,’ Edgar said. ‘Well now. You’m right as far as that goes. Leon here’s yer man. He could tell you things about they Wringers. Cudden you, Leon?’

‘Gaw bogger,’ Leon said, ‘I could an all.’

Then he lapsed into an impregnable silence.

A bright and gibbous moon illuminated the moor as Philip made his unsteady way towards the Stones. Where the path levelled he paused to get the lumps out of his breathing and heard voices.

The approaching figures appeared to be a girl holding hands with a penguin. They paused when they saw Philip, then came on cautiously. The girl had long bare legs and teetered on them like a spavined colt. The penguin was a boy wearing a peaked cap low over his face and gigantic black jeans and trainers; his crotch dangled just below his knees.

‘Gevening.’

The boy gargled a reply, a sound on the verge of human speech. He had a cider can in his spare hand. The girl sniggered. Moonlight glanced from the ring through her nose. When their laughter faded away behind him Philip soldiered on.

At first he supposed that the small figure sitting on the Altar Stone was a dwarfish hiker. The long and hooded garment might have been a cagoule, the footwear walking boots. On closer inspection, the coat appeared to be made not of Gore-tex, but of some oiled and blue-green fabric
a little like suede. It was fastened at the front by loops pulled over buttons made of bone. The walking boots were actually stout sandals with hobnailed soles. The face was small and wide and pale and child-like, except for the eyes, which were ancient. The creature’s hands lay slackly on its knees; they were almost white and the fingers were long. The nails were blue. When he spoke, the voice was as familiar to Philip as his own.

‘Terrible spotty arse that boy’s got,’ it said.

‘Are you …?’

‘Pocket Wellfair? Naturally.’ The old eyes studied Philip. ‘You look maggoty, pardon begged. Even worse than last time. You’re a bugger for the brew, I’d say.’

‘Please.’

‘Please?’ That frail, slightly harsh voice.

Philip’s tongue had thickened in his mouth. ‘Cadrel,’ he managed to say. ‘The baddle. I want. I must. Know what happens. How it ends. Morl.’

‘Ah,’ Pocket said. ‘Ends. Well, no, not as such. Unfinished business, as you might say. The battle, yes. And some after. I can do you that. Common wottage, that. Like nests in bare trees. Down in the ledgers, in my hand. No problem there. The problem lies in a different parish altogether.’

‘Please. I need … my agent, she’ll …’

The Greme raised his left hand. Its palm was featureless. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Now we come to the quick of it. I know what
you
need. I know what you need. Ho yes. But what’s the question needs asking?’

Philip knew, somehow. ‘What d’
you
need?’

‘Excellent! Excellent, indeed! The right man for the job, as we thought. So, we’ll make a deal, shall we? A bit sharpish? Time’s got its cap on and is heading for the door.’

‘What deal? Whachew mean?’

‘Straight arsy-varsy. I send you the rest, you get me the Amulet of Eneydos.’

‘
The
Amulet of Eneydos?’

‘No, any one of them. Of course,
the
Amulet of Eneydos, you stoolfungus. How many of the buggers do you think there are?’

‘But. It’s not. I don’t understan. How do I?’

Pocket Wellfair sighed. ‘It’s in
your realm
. That’s where Trover Mellwax hid it. Now he’s dead, if that’s what his bleddy trick is, we can’t get to it. Morl might be able to, but we don’t know. He’s working on it, though, you can bet your wife on that. But you, Marlstone,
you
could get it. Ho yes.’

‘Murd. Not marl.’

‘Whatsay?’

‘Nemmind. Doesn’ matter. Look, I, I don’ even know what the Amulet looks like. I didn’ see it. I dunno know what it
is
.’

The clerk sighed. ‘It’s about this big,’ he said, shaping his fingers, ‘and it’s got … Oh, in a pig’s
arse
! You’ll know it when you’ve got it. Now, do we have this deal or not?’

Philip felt his balance going. He put out a hand to lean
on a stone but it moved past. He leaned on the next one that came by.

‘If I say yes, you tell me the rest of the story?’

‘Every last curl and splot of it. As far as it goes.’

‘OK then.’

‘Sure?’ The clerk’s eyes were owl-bright, dark-adapted.

‘Yes, abslutely. Abslutely sure.’

‘Bleddy serious this is, Marlstone.’

Philip nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. Very serious. Very, very serious. I unnerstand that.’

Pocket studied Philip’s face unhappily. He sighed. ‘Right, then. I fluking hope you do. So what do your lot do to seal a deal? What’s your Oathmaking?’

Philip struggled towards translation, clarity. Blinked, worrying that it might all be gone. Found refuge in formality, as drunks do. ‘Well, in the absence of a written contract, a handshake is usually considered adequate.’

Pocket pulled a face. ‘Don’t reckon I fancy that,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to tether it the Greme way.’ He got to his feet. ‘Do this.’

The clerk put the thumb of his left hand on the lid of his left eye and the second finger on the lid of his right eye. Philip used the wrong hand, then got it right. Pocket waited impatiently. Then he parted his legs and grasped his crotch with his right hand.

‘Now do this.’

‘Do I have to?’

‘Yes you bleddy do.’

Philip gingerly handled himself between the legs.

‘Right,’ Pocket said sternly. ‘You got your fingers on your seeders?’

‘My what?’

‘Your seeders. Your cluster. Your eggs. Bollix.’

‘Er, yes, yes, I think so.’

‘Right. Now say after me. Word for word. Square, mind. Your brew-foggled brain upright enough for that?’

‘Yes. Yes, I think so,’ Philip said, and hiccupped.

Pocket sighed again and began:

‘By the Four Vital Orbs, I, Philip Marlstone …’

‘By the Four Vital Orbs, I, Philip Marlstone …’

‘Do make this deal with Pocket Wellfair.’

‘Do make this deal with Pocket Wellfair.’

‘Which I shall honour lest all four shrivel.’

‘Which I shall honour lest all four shrivel.’

The Greme then held his hands away from his body and shook them lightly, as though they were hot, or wet. He gazed at Philip with dire solemnity. ‘We’re square-set, then. I bleddy well hope you know what that means.’

‘Yes. I think I do.’

Pocket turned away, muttering. Philip could not make out the words. Something about a pig’s arse and making do. He waited.

‘Right then, Marlstone. Let’s get the bugger done. And when you get ahold of the Amulet, you bring it back here, and no pawky malarkey. I’ll know when the times line up. Now, where was you sitting grogstruck last time? Over there, wasn’t it?’

Murdstone found himself on the moonlit grass in the lee of Growly’s Thumb. When he looked up, all he could see was Pocket Wellfair’s eyes, huge, like the last thing a shrew might see before its death.

Then he was asleep.

A sword hissed from its scabbard.

Ink wriggled across a page. Battle-horns sounded.

A vermilion dawn revealed horrors.

The Sage turned to Cadrel and spoke words that Philip Murdstone could not have imagined.

On Monday morning, pinkly shaved and light-footed, Philip entered Flemworthy post office. His obvious cheerfulness caused his fellow customers to edge cautiously away from him. When he reached the counter he purchased a padded envelope, slid a CD into it, and addressed it, Special Delivery, to Minerva Cinch. This unusual transaction attracted a good deal of suspicious attention. He also bought a plastic wallet of coloured pencils.

When he recrossed the Square a niggardly drizzle was falling; but it seemed to the Weird Sisters, watching his progress from the lead-paned library window, that he was illuminated by a rogue sunbeam. They observed the casual gaiety of his stride, the new straightness of his shoulders, the privacy of his smile. Silently, they slid their thumbs into their mouths.