“There’s only so much vaguely fishy digestive juice Thomson would be prepared to put in their ear”
ANIMAL MAGIC
John turns the crisp packet upside down and shakes it, then offers it to Maya so she can fetch out the last of the paprika-flavoured crumbs. He drops the earpiece into the crisp packet and folds over the top, then hands it to Maya. She takes it in her beak and flies once round the vehicle to make sure it doesn’t interfere with her flight too much, before flying off towards where she last saw Thomson.
As she soars towards the tree under which Thomson was sheltering, she passes by a rookery. The rooks and jackdaws spot her and the shiny crisp packet, and descend en masse, croaking and cawing. They mob her, attracted by the shiny crisp packet. Despite her best efforts to fend them off, a particularly bolshie rook smacks her over the head, and she drops the crisp packet, only for an opportunistic jackdaw to snatch it out of the air and fly off with it.
With no other option available, Maya flies back to the car.
“What happened?” John asks, not expecting to see her again so soon.
“I was attacked by some crows,” she says. “I lost the transmitter.”
“What? You?” John starts laughing. “But you’re a great big herring gull! You’re a ninja in feathery form!”
Maya’s feathers are ruffled even though she’s not currently wearing them. “There were loads of them!” she protests. “And they were huge! And vicious!”
“If you say so. Well, I guess we’d better see what else we can find to replace the transmitter.”
John goes digging through the accumulated roadtrip detritus in the back of the car and eventually finds something that looks like the chopped-off end of an earbud. It’s not as small as the lost one, and it would be visible from the right angle, but it’s got to be better than nothing, right? Maya finds a small, handheld unit that makes a series of rapid clicks like a sperm whale homing in on a giant squid when she points it at the various bits of electronic wizardry in the Section 7 kit.
“This was made by Merlin, wasn’t it?” John says rhetorically. “So it’s magically enhanced. I dread to think how it will go wrong.” He remembers the underwater breathing apparatus that attracted sharks, even if sharks didn’t even live in that area. Those things could attract sharks in a landlocked freshwater lake. What the hell will one of his comms devices do? “Suppose it must have decent range on it, though.”
Maya pulls a receiver/transmitter from the case. It’s a box about the size of six audio cassettes stacked together. “We can bring this with us and find out.”
Everyone agrees that the crisp packet plan was somewhat flawed, and they don’t have any more crisp packets anyway, so this time Maya just takes the earpiece in her beak, careful not to swallow it down into her crop. There’s only so much vaguely fishy digestive juice Thomson would be prepared to put in their ear.
She avoids the rookery on her way back to Thomson, and lands on the far side of the big tree from the yoga class, which is still going on. She walks carefully around to where Thomson is still sitting, mindful of Topaz watching Thomson, and paddles around on the grass a bit as if looking for worms before lowering her head to set the earpiece on the ground within Thomson’s reach. She wanders off, pecks a bit at the ground for the sake of appearances, then launches herself back into the air and heads back to the car.
Thomson reaches with one hand to feel where Maya had obviously left something, careful not to look at what they’re doing in case Topaz asks to see what they picked up. It’s something small and feels vaguely electronic; they stuff it in their pocket for later.
Just in time; class finishes and Topaz comes over.
“How are you feeling?” she asks with genuine concern. “You seem to be finding everything very intense.”
“Yes, sorry. It’s just this place. It’s great, but I find it very overwhelming.”
“You must be very sensitive,” Topaz says. “I shall have a word with Marina and see if we can come up with some exercises that will suit you better without being too intense for you to cope with.”
“That would be wonderful, thank you.”
“Did I see you talking to a seagull just now?”
“Well,” Ashley says, “A seagull landed very close to me and came over. I couldn’t say if I was talking to it. I’ve always got on well with animals. I seem to have a calming effect on them.”
“Do you think that the seagull might have had a message for you? Had you considered that it might be what we call a companion animal, some sort of spirit guide?”
Ashley’s eyes widen. “I hadn’t considered that at all. Do you really think so?”
“Well, we wouldn’t normally expect to see a seagull here in the mountains so far from the ocean, and it came very close to you, so I would say it’s a very strong possibility, especially given how sensitive you are.”
“That would be wonderful. I never dared to hope that something like that could happen.”
Topaz smiles almost fondly. “We have a library in the main house, and while Marina doesn’t really like people using it unsupervised, I’m sure she will make an exception for you. I will tell her you need to read up on companion animals.”
“I’d be so grateful.”
“Good. Come on, I’m sure it must be time for lunch.”
Back at the car, the rest of the team consider what to do next. Maya plays with the volume controls on the receiver, turning it all the way up until she can hear what sounds like rustling noises. “Seems to be working,” she says with a shrug.
“I suppose our only other option is to go to the cave where C said they last tracked Bert,” Bea says. “We don’t have any more leads.”
The others agree.
They check the map and then navigate back onto the D8 and drive until they’re as close as they can get. Parking up at the side of the road, they find the track that leads into the woods, towards the mountain. It’s not a long walk, but it’s a hot day, and they are high in the Pyrennees. The air is filled with the scent of greenery and the songs of birds proclaiming their territories – presumably in French, although it doesn’t sound that different from British birds.
They follow the stone track until eventually they reach the cave entrance. It is blocked off by heavy iron bars, the door locked with a sturdy padlock.
“Did you bring the boltcutters?” Bea asks.
John pats his pockets. “Strangely enough, no.”
They all traipse back to the car.
At lunch, Ashley is sitting down at a long wooden table set out in one of the courtyards near the small houses where the guests stay. Everyone around the table is dressed in white except for them. The table is loaded with a vegan feast of fresh vegetables, fruits, salads, nuts and grains, most of which look like they were probably grown on the farm. They glance to the top of the table, where Marina Blavatsky is listening to Topaz murmuring something close to her ear. She looks straight down the table at Ashley, then turns to the man sitting on her left and says something to him. With a start, Ashley realises that he’s not wearing white, either. He is dressed entirely in black, and the only adornment on him is an amulet hanging around his neck. He meets Ashley’s gaze and, with a smirk, tucks the amulet under his shirt.
The team gets back to the car, moderately hot and bothered, and have a rummage. Maya finds some lockpicks in the Section 7 kit, but Bea insists on bringing the boltcutters, just in case. They also find a few more Merlin toys — a nanofibre rope around 150m long, gossamer thin and feather light, and a compact grappling hook that folds up into a tiny package, like origami.
John shakes his head. “I dread to think how those might go wrong.”
They head back to the cave.
The padlock does not succumb to the boltcutters. Maya hands Bea the lockpicks.
“We know you have something of a dark past, Bea. I’m sure you learned how to pick a lock at some point.”
It’s not necessarily a good thing that Maya knows about Bea’s past — the Sect has a very firm stance on black magic and evil things in general, after all — but Bea gets the lock open and they push the gate. It clangs loudly in the echo-chamber of the cave.
At lunch, Ashley’s pocket makes a loud, metallic noise that reverberates oddly. The man sitting next to them leans over, furtively trying to catch their eye.
“Do you…” He seems hesitant to speak. “Do you still have your phone? Was that a notification I just heard? Could I… Could I maybe borrow it? I’ve been here for two weeks. They haven’t let me even glance at mine since I got there. I haven’t spoken even to my family in all that time. Do you… Do you have facebook? Or twitter even? What’s happening in the world? I feel so lost.”
“This isn’t a good time,” Ashley says.
“Later then? I’m in house number 3.”
“Um… Maybe. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you.”
He turns away, as if pointedly ignoring them will make up for him actively soliciting illicit electronica.
Back at the cave, the team creep into what is clearly part of a vast network of tunnels and caverns inside the mountain. Maya takes the transmitter-receiver box from her pocket and thumbs the mute switch. “Should probably have done that earlier,” she says.
Progressing further inside the cave, they come across what appears to be a shallow pit inside a cage. Lying in the bottom of the pit are skeletal remains. Some of them look human, but the others don’t resemble anything currently living. They look old, but Bea recognises a particular kind of accelerated aging in the bones, in the way they aren’t fossilised but delicate and frangible, almost like packed dust. Someone summoned something here, some creature, and then locked it in a cage with a human and let them fight to the death. Maybe one of them survived the fight, maybe neither did; with the remains in this advanced state, it’s impossible to say.
They move on into the cave.
The cavern system becomes more complicated, and it is difficult to tell which way to go. The footprints they have been following head off in multiple directions, and there is every danger of becoming lost down here. They scuff dust from the floor, and it sparkles oddly, like tiny flecks of impossibly bright glitter caught by a powerful arc lamp. Magic is happening down here. There’s probably some sort of magical protection.
Maya checks the receiver, but the only noise it makes is a pffzzzt pffzzzt pffzzzt… pffzzzt pffzzzt… pffzzzt pffzzzt pffzzzt pffzzzt… pffzzzt.
The dust seems to drift in one particular direction, following gentle air currents, and so they decide to track that movement into the cave.
At the compound, Ashley is finishing her lunch with some fresh fruit when Blavatsky comes over. The woman crouches slightly next to Ashley’s chair, and again Ashley feels that comforting sense that nothing bad could possibly happen.
“Topaz tells me you would like to read about companion animals.”
“Yes! I was visited by a seagull, and Topaz suggested that perhaps it had a message for me, and I should try to find out what it is.”
“An excellent suggestion. Come with me.”
She takes Ashley’s hand and leads them to the house, then upstairs to the third floor.
“The library is here,” she says. “My office is just next door. The section on companion animals and spirit guides is over there. If you need anything, please just come and find me. My door is open.”
She goes into her office, leaving both doors open, and Ashley enters the library. It’s much tidier than Bea’s, and not as well stocked. There is room to move, for a start, and no piles of ancient texts and random scrolls lying higgledy-piggledy all over the place.
They’re not sure where to begin, but Thomson decides it will be nowhere near the section on companion spirits.
Further into the cave, and the team begins to feel uncomfortable. There is a sense of something crawling inside their limbs, an itch they can’t scratch; the feeling of being surrounded by midges but unable to swat them away, or a mosquito entering the ear when hands are bound. The further they progress, the worse it gets, until John can’t stand it any more.
“I feel like I need to claw my skin off,” he cries, close to panic. “I need to get out of here!”
“This is serious magical protection,” Bea says. “I need to know what’s down there.”
“I can’t stay. I need to get out!”
“Well, look. You take the communication box and head back outside, see if you can hear what Thomson is doing,” Maya says. “I’ll stay with Bea.”
“OK,” John says, snatching the box, turning on his heel, and booking it.
Maya and Bea carry on, each step making it harder and harder to resist the urge to tear their flesh from their bones with their fingers, their teeth, anything.
Even each other.
In the library, Ashley takes the opportunity to put the earpiece in, wiping gull spit off it on their jacket. Scanning the shelves, they find a pair of what appear to be leather-bound books — what kind of leather they dare not contemplate. They are ancient, battered, and the pages are made of vellum or… Again, best not to think about it. The language is unfamiliar, but the imagery is half Agrippa, half Voynich manuscript. Leafing through, Thomson finds a symbol that they recognise from the amulet that the man next to Blavatsky was wearing. They can’t read the text but recognise some of the other symbols in this section as being the kind of symbol someone might use to form a pact with a demonic entity. Summon the demon, make a bargain, wear their symbol for as long as the pact is in place. Power, riches, long life… The usual.
They quickly dig their phone out and take a picture, sending it to John and Bea because Maya’s still stuck with her stupid Nokia 3210 and it can’t handle pictures.
Saw a guy wearing an amulet, and this is the symbol. Might have a pact with a demon.
Footsteps in the hall outside thud towards the library. That’s not Blavatsky. Blavatsky wafts. Ashley is supposed to be finding out what the heck a seagull means as an animal companion, and Thomson hurries to put the books away before they are discovered.
John follows his own footsteps out of the cave, but before long he realises he should have reached the cage by now, and he hasn’t. He glances at the ground and realises the only footprints that belong to him are behind him, and they all point in the direction he’s facing. Looking around, he doesn’t recognise this part of the cave.
He carefully scrawls an X in the dirt, turns through 180° and follows his own footprints back in the direction he has just come, never looking up from the trail. When he reaches where his steps head off in another direction, he draws another big X in the dirt, then follows those, hopefully in the direction of the cave entrance and safety.
The closer they get, the more familiar this sensation is to Bea. A long time ago, so long it feels like another lifetime, she was in South America, making a decent living working freelance for a number of underground crime syndicates. Each of them thought they had her exclusive services, but she went where the money was, and if someone was willing to pay, well…
One of the crime bosses had acquired, by means about which she had never thought it prudent to ask, a skull. Not an ordinary human or animal skull — he could have had as many of those as he wanted for pocket change — but something else altogether. This was only vaguely human, with a low, flat cranium that swept back from a heavy, anvil-like brow like the landing deck of an aircraft carrier. It was covered in strange symbols that were impossible to copy, so badly did they hurt the eyes. They seemed to move and shift, shimmer as if in a heat haze, following impossible, contorted lines that didn’t exist in normal space. They were not drawn, or carved: they were part of the bone itself. Inside the eye sockets flickered the colours of flame, of molten rock, of iron heated to melting. It gave off an intense, bone-curdling heat, and it was impossible to remain within the same room as it for more than 5 seconds without wanting to tear your own eyes out.
The skull, with the right incantations and some of the type of ingredients that people don’t usually offer willingly, would open a portal to Hell. The effect of the skull by itself was bad enough; being locked in the same room as the open portal had caused one victim to bite the flesh off his arms, all the way down to the bone. They kept it in a lead box, and Bea had developed a magical protection so that she could get into the room where they kept it, take it out of the box, and get out again before she did herself harm. Her one stipulation had been that she only ever had to go in there when there was no one else in the room. She didn’t want to see it in use. She’d heard enough stories on the street to know what they did with it.
Give them their dues: they’d always made sure there was nothing left of what they’d been doing when they’d asked her to go back in and put it away again.
They reach the point where they physically cannot go any further. Chemical reactions that have stopped biology self-immolating since the dawn of time see to that. Every primordial instinct in every cell brings them to a grinding halt.
“Listen,” she says to Maya. “I think I know what’s down there, and I have ways to keep myself safe, but I can’t protect you. You have to go back.”
“What do you mean?” Maya asks. “I’m not letting you go down there by yourself.”
“You must. I can protect myself, but I can’t help you.”
“I don’t understand! How could you know what’s down there? What do you mean? I’m not leaving you!”
Bea bites back on the frustration, knowing that it will make her more vulnerable. She doesn’t want to tell Maya what’s in her past. It is utterly incompatible with the Sect’s mission. Who knows what it would do to their relationship. But what choice does she have? “Look, I used to work for this guy who had a skull that would open a portal to Hell. I think that’s what’s down there. Or something like it. It feels almost the same. I have magical protection I can use, but it only works on me. You HAVE to go back!”
Maya forces another couple of steps forwards, but falls back immediately.
“All right,” she says. “We need to talk about this later.”
She turns and runs.
Bea takes one of her magical pouches from her pocket. She hadn’t thought she’d need this one on this trip.
Thomson is still trying to remember where they found the books when they feel the hairs prickle on the back of their neck and there is the unmistakeable sensation of not being alone in the room.
They turn round, and the man who had been sitting next to Blavatsky at lunch is standing there watching them. His gaze is open, frank, intense, unguarded, unapologetic. Most people only meet someone else’s gaze in conversation, and even then it is not constant. This man looks at Thomson as if they are a laboratory specimen.
“Some extra-curricular reading, I see,” he says. His voice is smooth, warm, exuding a confidence that is almost electrifying. This man walks into a room and owns it, no matter the room, no matter the company.
“I…” Thomson stumbles and Ashley takes over. “I was looking for something on animal companions and I felt drawn to these books. There was something in them that just called to me.”
“And you’ve read them, I take it?”
“I’ve looked at them. I can’t claim to have read them.”
“Hmmm.” He smiles, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. They are dark and deep, almost black, and it seems impossible a smile would find space inside them. “Marina told me you were sensitive. She must have been right. Most people couldn’t even find those books.”
“What… What do you mean?”
“I could bring your friend Luna in here, tell her those books were in here and I wanted them, and she still wouldn’t be able to find them. That you could suggests something odd, don’t you think?”
“I don’t understand.”
“No. I don’t expect you to.” He perches on the edge of a table and drums his fingers on the edge. The amulet is still tucked safely under his shirt; Ashley can see the chain around his neck. “I imagine Marina will be along shortly to find out what you’ve learned about companion animals.” There’s something supercilious in the way he says it, as if he doesn’t really believe they exist. “I think you should probably have something to tell her, don’t you?”
Without waiting for a response, he leaves the room.
Feeling like that could have gone a lot worse, and that was quite possibly the best person to have found them reading the wrong books, especially those books, Thomson finds the place on the shelf for the two volumes, then starts riffling through some books on animal magic.
Maya finds John stumbling around between several stalagmites. He walks into one, rebounds, turns, walks until he hits another one, rebounds, turns, walks until he hits another one… He’s like a Roomba that can’t find its way out of a bunch of furniture.
Mayra grabs his arm and keeps going, dragging him with her out of the cave. They only stop once they can see the sky.
“Whew!” John says. “Thanks for getting me out of there. I don’t know what happened. It was like I was mazed, or something.”
“Probably something to do with the magical defences. At least you didn’t drop the box.”
John still has the comms box in his hand.
“No. There is that. Where’s Bea?”
“She said something about a portal to Hell and being able to counteract it or something.”
“A portal to WHAT?!” As John’s phone picks up the nearest cell tower, it buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out and reads the message. “Speaking of Hell, I’ve got a message from Thomson.”
Maya leans over and looks at it. “We should forward that to someone. Here. I’ll give you Dakota’s number.” She pulls up his contact details on her own phone and shows them to John.
“Okay. What do you want me to say?”
“‘Found this picture of an amulet, can you find out about it’?”
John dutifully types his message into the phone and hits send.
“Hopefully he’ll be able to tell us what it means,” Maya says.
The park themselves on the picnic table by the cave entrance and settle down to wait for Bea.
Ashley looks up when Marina Blavatsky comes into the room and sits gracefully on one of the chairs.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I think so,” Ashley says. “I’ve learned that seagulls are social, and they look after their family, but they don’t like to be too close — herring gulls don’t like to touch each other like other gulls do, and they keep a ‘safe distance’ from others of their kind. But they don’t like to be alone, either, and they only really fight over food, or to protect their eggs and chicks. If there’s more food than one bird can eat, they call all the other birds to come and share.”
“It sounds like your gull friend was giving you advice on how you can be part of this community,” Blavatsky says, clearly moved.
“I have to say, this really does speak to me,” Ashley says.
“It seems to me that the gull was saying that you do belong here, and you can be part of our community and share in our greater mission, but we need to make sure you have your personal space.”
“I think so. I’m so glad you feel that way too.”
“I think I shall speak with Topaz and we shall come up with a programme for you that you can work on that involves less personal contact than we would generally advise for someone with your particular blockages. Especially given how sensitive you clearly are.”
“That would be marvellous.”
“I’m so pleased we had this chat,” Blavatsky says. “Shall we go and see about getting you settled in?”
As they walk out of the library, Ashley realises they sense nothing in Blavatsky that would have come from the man with the amulet. Thomson had thought maybe the man was acting as a power bank for Blavatsky; a contractor she’d brought in to amp up her abilities. But Ashley can’t detect anything like that.
And Thomson begins to wonder what it means that they can tell.
Bea hefts the pouch in her hand, then hurls it at the ground by her feet. It explodes in a cloud of sparkly, rainbow-coloured dust, and she feels the terrible effect of whatever is down there move into the background. It’s still there, but muted, muffled, like hearing someone speak in another room.
She follows the increasing intensity — the thaumobars — deeper into the cave, aware that she doesn’t have long before this armour wears off. The sheer intensity of this dark magic field will wear it away.
Another couple of hundred metres in, and she finds another pool of water in a cavern. It glows with intense sapphire light. There is a rocky outcrop in the middle of the water and, hovering above the outcrop, an orb. It rotates slowly, eldritch blue glimmers emanating from odd shaped cut-outs on its surface.
She can’t get any closer. Her armour isn’t potent enough to combat the magic here. Grimacing, she takes her bolas from her pocket and lets fly. It hits the orb squarely, but the rope parts, and the pieces fall into the water.
With a muttered curse, she realises there’s nothing more she can do here. She can’t get any closer, and her armour is starting to fade. She quickly scans the cavern, looking for clues, but it’s becoming harder to concentrate, and images she had thought long-forgotten are introducing into her thoughts.
She turns and heads back out of the cave.
It’s such a relief to be out of the most intense part of the dark field that the mazing has little effect on her. She makes it out through the stalagmite maze and past the cage no problem.
Just as she’s feeling the sense of relief at making it out turn to frustration at not being able to accomplish more, she hears footsteps behind her. They are running.
She spins around.
Quartz is sprinting towards her. His expression is stone cold, his eyes murderous.
And he has a gun.