Doctor Illuminatus Page 11

  “And the bridge?” Pip asked.

  “That was also made of stone from the quarry. It was built some time before my father came, for it was here when Rawne Barton was built. It was used to bring stone for the house. My father was permitted to charge a toll to those crossing it.”

  Tim stopped dead in his tracks.

  “Look!” He pointed ahead. “The hippies must’ve got their act together.”

  Between the old stone piers of the bridge, two long thick planks of wood spanned the river, bound together in the center by a length of blue plastic rope.

  “Really helpful of them,” Pip remarked sarcastically, “giving the bailiff — de Loudéac — a way over the river like that.” She looked across the makeshift bridge. “It’s at least ten meters over to the other bank and,” she added, her voice betraying more than a hint of reluctance, “five meters above the water. There’s no way I can go over those planks. I don’t like heights and they’re no wider than a book.”

  “Our passage will be quite safe,” Sebastian assured her, and, grinning mischievously, he took their hands.

  Pip and Tim felt slightly light-headed, then found themselves on the top of the stone pier on the opposite bank. Behind them, the plank was undulating slightly.

  “Have we just walked over that?” Pip asked disbelievingly.

  “All you need to have is control of your mind,” Sebastian said bluntly. “Or,” he added with a smirk, “pass that control to another.”

  They took the path up through the trees where Tim had followed Splice. Just before reaching the clearing beneath the old quarry face, Sebastian halted and closed his eyes.

  “There has been much evil in this place,” he whispered. “We must beware. Stay close to me. Be alert.”

  With that, they stepped into the clearing.

  The two vehicles were where Tim had last seen them. The windows of the bus had the curtains drawn. The coachwork was decorated with a skillfully painted picture of the moon with a beam of light arcing out from it. There were silhouettes sitting upon it and waving. On the rear luggage compartment door was written Moonbeamers Inc. in psychedelic lettering. The van was unadorned. One of its tires was only half inflated.

  Sebastian walked quickly to the campfire and, going down on his haunches, held his hand over the ashes. On the ring of stones forming a hearth was balanced a smoke-blackened pot, which he touched lightly.

  “The ashes are still warm,” he said, rising to his feet, “yet the water in the pot has cooled. It is at least two hours since this fire was last burning bright. How many do you say were living here?”

  “I saw four men, two women and a baby,” Tim replied. “And a dog.”

  Going over to the van, Sebastian studied it for a moment, then beckoned to Tim and Pip.

  “See this,” he said.

  A section of the metal side panel looked as if it were rumpled.

  “It’s a dent,” Tim decided, looking along the side of the vehicle and adding, “One of many. Looks like Splice hasn’t passed his test.”

  “This is not a dent,” Sebastian declared. “Run your hand over it.”

  Tim did so. The ridges in the metal were rounded, the paint smooth as if it had only just been sprayed on and then highly polished.

  “Maybe he’s repaired it,” Tim ventured.

  “No,” Sebastian said, “This metal has been melted and then hardened again.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “This was not done by the hippy,” Sebastian continued. “This was de Loudéac’s shout. At close range, it can heat up metal so as to make it liquid.”

  “He’s been here?” Pip murmured.

  “Yes. And within the last few hours, probably after meeting Tim, whilst returning whence he came.”

  “If he went upstream,” Tim reasoned, “then he was heading in the direction of Brampton. Do you think that is where he is staying?”

  “I think it highly likely,” Sebastian decided, “but he will not be conducting his magical working there. For that, he must be elsewhere, where there are no people who may observe him.”

  “If he’s been here,” Pip said quietly, “what has happened to the hippies?”

  “Pray God they are at the market,” Sebastian answered and, walking over to the bus, he tried the door handle. It was locked.

  “What’s this?” Tim pondered aloud, peering at a mark in the earth by the bus door. Impressed into the soil was what appeared to be the hoof print of a deer, two parallel slots with a pointed front, sloping down into the dirt.

  “It is, indeed, the mark of a cloven hoof, that of a goat,” Sebastian said.

  “I didn’t see any goats when I was here selling my fish.”

  “No,” Sebastian agreed, “you did not, for this is no ordinary goat but de Loudéac in his caprine manifestation.”

  “Like, what?” Tim exclaimed.

  “What was he doing, the great god Pan,” Pip recited, “Down in the reeds by the river, Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat.”

  “Like, what?” Tim said again.

  “We learned it in speech and drama,” Pip replied. “It’s a poem about the Greek god Pan, who had goat’s feet. Caprine means goat-like . . .”

  “The god Pan could induce terrible fear in men,” Sebastian interrupted, “driving them mad. The word panic comes from his name. When he died, it was said a great voice proclaimed his passing along the whole coast of ancient Greece.”

  “A great voice . . . .” Tim repeated.

  “De Loudéac walks with the devil and has at his side the powers of chaos.”

  Pip touched Sebastian’s arm.

  “I can smell him,” she whispered.

  Sebastian, once again, held both their hands and said, softly, “We must begone from here.”

  Hand in hand, they set off down the path to the river. The odor grew stronger with each step. Pip held on to Sebastian as tightly as she could. She wanted to call for help but her terror prevented her. As Tim walked, he mentally counted off the landmarks he remembered.

  Suddenly, he saw something beneath a bush. It was hairy, lying in wait for them. He thought he could see an eye, staring.

  “Sebastian . . .” Tim muttered, looking straight at it, but Sebastian had already seen it.

  They moved closer. The stink was now overpowering. The sunlight filtering through the trees flickered on something slick and wet and dark green, like the body of a snake.

  Yet it was not a reptile. It was Woof, the hippies’ mongrel. He was lying on his side, disemboweled. Behind him, deeper in the shadow of the bush, was something white. Tim moved the branches aside. Lying on the dried leaves and twigs was a severed human leg.

  “Don’t look, Pip!” Tim shouted, but it was too late. “Oh, God! Oh, God!” Pip screamed.

  Tim put his arm around his sister, averting her face. And as he did so, the leg and the corpse of Woof just dissolved into thin air.

  Six

  Artifice and Artistry

  “Now you three behave yourselves,” Mr. Ledger said, with a twinkle in his eye. “No helping yourselves to my cognac, no poker games, no dancing girls and no, I repeat no, circus performers.”

  “If we weren’t new here,” Mrs. Ledger added, somewhat frostily and clearly annoyed by her husband’s flippancy, “you’d have a babysitter. As it is, we don’t know anyone, so you’re being left on trust.”

  “Come along, Barbara,” her husband chivvied her. “They’ll be all right.”

  “Thanks for letting Sebastian stay over,” Tim said. “Just so long as who needs to know knows,” his father replied, holding his car keys up and jangling them in midair, at the same time giving his wife a brief but searching look as she fumbled in her handbag. “We’re off. Be back about eleven.”

  “There are some sandwiches in the fridge,” Mrs. Ledger announced, “and you can have the cheese, but not the gorgonzola. The Pepsis are in the cool-box compartment at the bottom of the door. Don’t
eat the cold chicken because that’s for lunch tomorrow. And don’t cook anything. There’s a tub of Häagen-Dazs in the —”

  “Barbara . . . !”

  “Behave!” was her final, sternly delivered word. The front door closed, promptly followed by the sound of tires on gravel.

  Opening three cans of Pepsi, they went out and sat on deck chairs on the lawn, beneath the mulberry tree, overlooking the ha-ha and the meadow, with the river in the distance. Pip made quite sure she was not on the side nearest the Angel’s Trumpet plant.

  “What do you think happened to the hippies?” Pip ventured.

  “One cannot speculate,” Sebastian said matter-offactly.

  “Do you think they are all dead?”

  “Perhaps,” Sebastian said. “Perhaps not. It may be they are no longer in possession of their wits, that they are de Loudéac’s now. If he has a use for them . . .” He left the rest unsaid.

  They fell silent. The evening sun was low over the river and the fields and woods beyond it.

  “It must be strange,” Tim said, thinking out loud, “to live for so long, through so many centuries, and see how the world has changed.”

  “Evil never changes,” Sebastian answered. “Only the means by which it seeks its end.”

  “You mean,” Pip said, “you don’t really look at how the world has altered? I mean, when you were a boy — or, rather, before you first hibernated — people must have just traveled by horse and cart. Now they have bicycles, cars, trains, aircraft.” The more she thought about it, the more incredible it seemed. “Electric lights, telephones, wristwatches . . .”

  “I have looked,” Sebastian replied, “and I have learnt that which I need to know to assist me in my mission.”

  “So,” Tim went on, “you know what cars are, but you don’t know how they work and you can’t drive.”

  “An automobile operates by the explosion of flammable liquids under pressure in a confined chamber, forcing down a piston which creates motion that may be disseminated through gears. This I know. Yet, in truth, the first car I came close to was that of your father, for my uncle owned no such vehicle.”

  “I think, sis,” Tim announced, “it’s time we educated Sebastian a bit, don’t you?”

  Taking Sebastian indoors, Tim switched on the television. This did not faze Sebastian: his uncle had had a television, albeit a black-and-white set. What did fascinate him, however, was the remote. He could not at first comprehend how the controls communicated with the television but, when Tim explained the principle of how it worked, Sebastian not only grasped the concept of infrared rays, but also pointed out that he understood the concept of black light which, he stated, was used by alchemists to create what he termed visual banishment. When Pip took Sebastian into the kitchen, he similarly understood the way in which the microwave worked, likening it to the heating effect de Loudéac’s shout had had on the hippies’ van. It was, he said, a matter of causing agitation in the atoms, which in turn created heat.

  However, as the twilight deepened outside and they went upstairs, first locking all the doors and checking all the windows, Sebastian was to meet his match when confronted by Pip’s CD player. The basic premise of what a laser was he could understand, but not how it read music from a silver disc and then played it.

  “If you think that’s cool,” Tim said, “follow me. This’ll blow your mind.”

  Tim sat Sebastian in front of his computer.

  “Do you know what a computer does?”

  “I assume it computes,” Sebastian replied. “Computes?”

  “Conducts mathematical calculations,” Sebastian responded.

  “Well, in a way it does,” Pip said. “Only in binary mathematics.”

  Sebastian looked puzzled. “Binary?”

  “To the base of two,” Tim explained. “But that’s only the start of it. If you work to a base of only two, you have only two numerical possibilities. It’s like having off and on. You can’t have half off and half on. In the computer is a microchip. It is minute but, in simple terms, it contains millions of, like, little switches and these go on or off according to how an electric current flows through them and —”

  “Just switch it on, Tim,” Pip said.

  The hard disk whirred, the cooling fan hummed and the monitor came on with the front-end graphics for Windows 2000. After a moment, the screen cleared to Tim’s desktop.

  “It is a television,” Sebastian declared.

  “No,” Tim said, “it’s a computer monitor. Watch this.”

  He leaned across in front of Sebastian, moved the mouse up and clicked on Start/Programs/Accessories/ Games/Solitaire. He started the game but reached stalemate in ten moves with no more cards available to be played. He clicked on Close and returned to the desktop.

  Sebastian stared at the screen for a moment. “How is this possible?”

  “It’s magic,” Tim said, grinning. “But if you think that’s something, watch this.” He reached up to the rack on the bookcase beside his computer table. “A CD doesn’t just have music on it.”

  Sliding open the CD-ROM drive, Tim put in Mobil 1 Rally Championship, turned up the volume on his sub-woofer and plugged in his steering wheel to the spare USB port on the front of his computer. With a few keystrokes, he was ready to go. The roadside clock counted down and he was off, wheels spitting gravel, the engine screaming until he slipped up into second gear, then third. The stage he chose to drive was a short one, less than two miles: it took him eighty-three seconds.

  “It is thus when driving a car?” Sebastian asked. “Only rallying,” Tim answered, sliding the steering wheel across the desk and pressing it down on its suckers. “Your turn. And after this, I’ll fly you to Paris.”

  Pip left them to it and returned to her room, switching on her own computer, her father’s last notebook computer. For her, a computer was not a glorified games console: it was a tool to help her with her studies, surf the Internet and create. Where her brother drove rally cars, flew airliners and played pinball, she painted and drew cartoons with the aid of a graphics pad, animating them with a program that her father had bought for his work as a television-commercial producer but no longer used — and composed music with a software package called MusicWrite. The latter was superb, for it allowed her to connect her keyboard to the sound card in the notebook so that what she played appeared as printed music on the TFT screen.

  She glanced at the clock. It said 10:38.

  After ten o’clock it was what her father termed a Ledger House Rule that no one played music or computer games except with earphones. This rule was suspended when her parents were out, but Pip still preferred to wear hers. They helped her to concentrate, all the more so now that the sounds of screaming car engines were coming from Tim’s room.

  Slipping the earphones over her head, she plugged them into the computer. Since the family had moved to Rawne Barton, she had not worked on her latest composition. Turning the volume up with the touch pad, she set the program running. It was a classical piece about ten minutes long, which Pip hoped she might have the school orchestra perform one day — that was, she now considered, if Bourne End Comprehensive had an orchestra. She had already laid down a track with the basic melody and was now adding more instruments to it.

  As the music built to a climax, her head filled with sound. The oboe was rich, the clarinet fluid, rising through the notes to a point where, suddenly, the violins joined in. She admitted to herself, listening to it again, that it did bear more than a passing resemblance to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue but, as Mr. Bax, the music teacher at her last school, had told her, all art is imitative of itself. That was her excuse, anyway.

  The music faded, the score moving across the screen as the instruments fell silent, one by one, to leave just the clarinet. That too, in turn, drifted away.

  As the last note died out, Pip noticed a repetitive scratching noise. Puzzled, she clicked on Media Player and played just the last ten bars of her composition. When the l
ast hint of music was gone, the interference remained although the green line of the wave signal was absolutely horizontal.

  Pip removed her earphones. The noise persisted. Perhaps, she thought, it was some game Tim and Sebastian were playing. Yet the sound coming from Tim’s room was now the low, insistent hum that one might hear in the cockpit of a Boeing 747-400 on autopilot. She turned to switch off the computer, catching a brief glimpse of her face reflected in her bedroom window.

  But her face was superimposed over another’s. Above it was a black top hat, hair hanging down on either side in dreadlocks that shone as if they had been oiled.

  Pip opened her mouth and screamed.

  The face did not move, but one of the eyes winked at her.

  She became conscious of feet running in the passage outside her bedroom door. Tim and Sebastian rushed in.

  “What’s up, sis?” Tim asked.

  Pip could do nothing but grab her brother’s arm and point at the window, another scream filling her mouth yet somehow not able to escape.

  Tim followed her finger and exclaimed, “It’s Splice!”

  He prized Pip’s hand off his arm. Her fingers were stiff with fear. Sebastian took her hand.

  Moving towards the window, Tim shouted, “Splice! What do you think you’re doing? This is my sister’s bedroom. You can’t just . . .”

  A hand appeared from below the window sill and, as if with extreme politeness, lifted the top hat. Splice’s skull had been caved in, the soft pinkish sponge of his brain exposed, blood trickling down the dreadlocks.

  The scream escaped from Pip’s mouth, but it was not so much a piercing shriek as a squeak, such as a rabbit might make, trapped in a snare.

  A bright light shone from somewhere in the distance. By it, Tim could see Splice was not alone. Hovering in the air behind him were the other hippies. Abby was just a disembodied head, the flesh of her neck hanging in ragged tatters. Reedy was grinning lewdly, his lips spattered with blood. Dark Horse held up the severed leg Tim had seen under the bush and was waving it as he might a club. Filomena, her hair disheveled like a grotesque halo around her face, held Starlight upside down by one leg, as a miscreant child might hold an unloved teddy bear.