The Magic Cottage

THINGS UNLEASHED

MYCROFT VANISHED back up those stairs—and there were other footsteps too, obviously of those followers who had remained out of sight—as I held up my hands and studied them, wondering why they palpitated so and why my scalp (and other hairy parts of me) prickled and felt so itchy-dry. I touched my head and my hair was brittle (I'd almost expected it to be standing erect, punklike). So was this the physical sensation that came with the possession of Magic?

The possession of Magic. Now that just couldn't be! Not me, not Mike Stringer, skeptic and part-time infidel. But I was being carried along by something that had little regard for my own self-doubt and confusion.

"Mike . . ."

Val was resting against the table, hands on either side clutching the edge. She looked shocked, and that was hardly surprising with all that had happened since she'd stepped inside the cottage. Now, though, she was growing curious about me, sensing the change that was taking place.

I don't suppose that change was visible in any real way, but she knew it was happening all right. Of course, there might have been blue sparks shooting from my ears for all I knew, but I didn't think so. The shift in my mind was slight, however, otherwise I think I'd have been totally overwhelmed by this metamorphosis.

The funny thing was, I was afraid, but the fear didn't frighten me. Does that make sense? The fear excited me, because this was something new, and with the acquisition—or I should say, the releasing—there came a feeling of well-being, an essential element that helped balance the power. Imagine being born blind and then, one day, a knock on the head enables you to see (the ability having been there all along). Think of the excitement, the awe for everything around you. The fear of it.

Yet still I wasn't a hundred percent certain. Flora's touch and thoughts had instilled the knowledge, flicked the switch of awareness, but what the hell?—I could have been hallucinating. There was only one way to find out, and a nervous thrill flushed through me as I headed for the stairs.

Val attempted to grab my arm as I passed, but something made her withdraw her hand before she made contact.

I ran up the stairs, ready (and eager?) for combat.

The Synergists were waiting, but were in some disarray; it wasn't just Mycroft's evident panic, nor my approach, that had caused their disorder.

A blue-violet sheen emanated from every object in the round room—the sofa, the chairs, the units, books, pictures, the mantelshelf, the windowframes, curtains: everything—bathing the room in its eerie light, the ceiling light itself tainted by the electric color. Spielberg himself couldn't have produced a more startling effect. To a lesser degree, but equally mind-boggling, the same glow outlined the living bodies in the room. If someone had snapped their fingers, static would have thundered in the air; if someone had sneezed, air currents would have created a storm.

The round room was alive.

It throbbed and hummed with its own power, but there was no sound and there was no movement: its existence could only be sensed and wondered at.

I stood in the doorway and felt the room breathe on me. Off to one side, Gillie was being helped to her feet by the girl called Sandy. Others were peering anxiously around at the walls, the furniture. Neil Joby looked about ready to throw up again. I watched as one of the men touched the drawing-board easel beneath the broken window and quickly drew back as the glow spread along his arm, strengthening his own light for a moment. The Bone Man was there and I could tell he wanted out, only I was blocking the doorway; he stood frozen in a loping attitude. Kinsella still had hold of Midge, and he seemed calmest of all.

Even calmer than Mycroft, who was near the center, his eyes for me alone.

Now was the testing time. I gulped.

First, Kinselia.

I was hesitant—and who wouldn't have been in my position?—so maybe that was why it didn't work immediately. I needed time and experience to build confidence, and had neither.

Kinsella suddenly found himself with an armful of goat. I've no idea why I chose a goat—it just flashed into my mind and I transferred the thought into his arms. Unfortunately, the image was only fleeting: Midge was back there under his grasp before he had time to register surprise and let go. His astonishment followed a second later, but he still held on to her, his jaw dropped and eyebrows arched. He blinked, thinking there'd been some mistake, and Midge struggled to free herself.

Nonetheless, something had happened and that at least lent a grain of credibility to what I was asking myself to believe. I could do it! I only had to concentrate hard and it could happen! I'd been wrong all along about Midge: she was certainly an important element in all this, a catalyst of some kind, but she wasn't the successor to Gramarye. Oh no, it was me, for Chrissake! Me! But now wasn't the time to ponder.

My thought struck again, and I tried to sustain it, already learning the tricks, or the art, or the craft, of Magic. Kinsella discovered he had an arm-lock on a grinning python. The image was more than momentary and, with a girlish shriek, he let go.

Midge collapsed to the floor.

"Get over here, Midge!" I yelled and she began crawling, not understanding why the American had dropped her and probably not caring—she just wanted to get to me.

But Mycroft's cane prodded her back and froze her there.

"Do you think you're a match for me?" Mycroft shouted in my direction.

And, honest-to-God, I chuckled. I think hysteria had returned and was sweeping me along at that point.

He became undeniably enraged—I suppose he felt I was mocking him (and maybe he'd got it right). He aimed his cane/wand and the doorframe around me burst into flame. I stumbled back into the hallway, singed and frightened, as the opening became a door of fire.

I had time to notice Val watching me bug-eyed from the stairway, her horrified face lit up by flames. I'd never known her lost for words before, but to give her credit she did her best to speak. All she managed was to flap her mouth.

"Don't ask," I said to her.

Then I plunged back through the fire-filled doorway without giving myself time for further consideration, because at this stage of the game either I believed or I didn't—there were no halfway measures.

I heard Val's raspy scream, but other noises inside the room quickly drowned that. The fire behind me instantly snuffed out and I found I wasn't even scorched.

Mycroft and I faced each other across the room, while around us his Synergists moaned and groaned, not particularly concerned with me, more interested in what was going on around them. Everything in the room—the supposedly inanimate objects, I mean—was not only weirdly glowing, but was now pulsing: chairs, units, even the walls, were now all beating like odd-shaped hearts. The carpet was moving as though strong hands underneath were pushing upward. And the glass fragments that had been scattered from the windows were oscillating inches from the floor like jumping-bean crystals. Bone Man was reaching for a window catch, several followers jostling him from behind, eager to be off and away from the cottage; but when he clasped the metal catch his body vibrated and what hair he had crackled as if he'd been shocked. He leapt away, taking the others with him in a tumble of thrashing arms and legs. There were screams from women in the room (and no doubt from several of the men) and I saw that Joby had finally given up the contents of his stomach, except his vomit refused to leave his body completely—it flowed down his neck and chest and over his shoulders in a lumpy coating. Bricks and soot crashed down into the fireplace, a cloud of dust spreading outward to curl and linger in the air; the fungus on the walls seemed to be bubbling putrescence.

The round room had lost a lot of its charm.

Mycroft was mouthing something I couldn't quite catch over the hubbub; I guess it was an incantation rather than a grumbled complaint, and I wondered what he had in mind. I soon found out.

A web began raveling itself around me, pinning first my arms and then my legs, spinning round and round, taut like fine steel, covering my chest and lower body, taking no time at all to join the weave that rose from my thighs. The silver web crossed over my shoulders and I saw there were scores of tiny spiders among the strands, busy at work, darting hairy-legged to and fro. The cocoon grew rapidly, taking less than a minute, soon reaching my throat, where it tightened. In fact the whole mess became tight, so that I had difficulty in breathing.

Midge was on her knees, held there by Kinsella, whose hand dug into her hair. She shrieked out my name.

And me, scared? Yeah, more than I can say.

But I forced a calmness on myself because this was only trickery, only as real as my own mind allowed it to be. I drew an invisible blade down the strands.

They popped apart and before the cut had extended to my stomach, the whole web disappeared.

"That your best shot?" I taunted Mycroft, displaying a cockiness I didn't altogether feel.

The unseen sledge hammer that punched me out into the hallway again told me he'd only just started. I lay against the back door, winded and vowing to watch my lip in future. The pain came from my shoulders, though, where they'd struck the door, and not from my chest where I imagined I'd been hit.

Pushing myself up, I ran back into the round room, colliding with Synergists who were making a break for it, fear finally overcoming loyalty to their leader. They flinched away from me as though I were a plague carrier, hurrying back into the room. I had to admit I couldn't blame them for trying to escape, because it was a decidedly unhealthy place to be. If Midge hadn't been in there, I'd have cut and run myself.

The floorboards were ripping through the carpet, curling upward as though sucked by a whirlwind; even the ceiling was becoming bowed, dome-shaped. Long, jagged cracks were striping the walls.

Lightning streaked from Mycroft's cane toward my heart and reflexively I blocked it with a thought. And then sent it back.

His cane exploded, burning shards flying into the air. He staggered backward and almost fell. But recovered and stared at me with a mixture of astonishment and terrible hatred. The apprentice had shaken the master, I mused grimly.

Then he showed me things I don't want to see—or imagine—ever again.

He unzipped a nightmare and shoved me through. I was no longer inside Gramarye but was somewhere else, in another dimension that was gloomy and limitless, where rot and decay were fragrance, where pain and suffering were succor. A dark plain where loathing replaced loving, where obscenity substituted for purity. I don't know if he'd slipped me through the side door of hell, or had led me down a lost corridor inside my own mind. Maybe they were both the same thing.

All I knew was that unless I retreated from this underworld where horror shuffled in the darkness around me, unless I found my way back within moments, then here I'd stay forever. It had something to do with the relinquishment of my own will.

I saw a mass lumbering toward me from the shadows, a mass that I thought was an advancing mob, saw their legs hobbling forward, outlines of waving arms, a bobbing head here and there; but when they drew close I realized they were just one burned mass of people, fused together by a fire that had melted their flesh into each other's. I saw a river that flowed through the air over my head, creatures inside its putrid waters that were neither fish nor man, but partly both; they fed upon each other, choosing one in a pack to ostracize then devour. I saw reptilian things that slithered over the black-ash earth, and when they drew near they were merely membrane sacks filled with a multitude of wriggling forms, different species of worms, grubs and insects all sharing the same transparent shell, their own restlessness causing the movement of the whole. I saw shapes of monsters that defied description, I absorbed thoughts too despicable to relate. I existed in a sullen and tenebrous nether region whose very hideousness had its own allure.

Something slimy cold coiled around my ankle and I screamed.

And before the scream had died on my lips, Midge's voice brought me back to my proper world, bizarre and chaotic though it had become.

I didn't know how she'd got away from Kinsella, but there she was, shaking me, pounding my chest, jolting me from that other dimension, bringing me back from somewhere deep inside myself, a dark and secret place that lies within us all.

She stopped bullying me only when recognition dawned in my eyes; she buried her head against me.

"Oh, Mike, Mike, I was so scared! It wasn't you standing here—for a moment it was just an empty shell, there was no life!"

I hugged her, relief turning into elation—the feeling you might get after surviving a horrendous accident; the haunting dread of what might have been would come later.

Although I'd been mistaken about Midge's role in events leading to this moment, I realized again that she'd had a major part to play: she was certainly a catalyst, but not the kind I'd thought; she had always been the motivator for me, the link between myself and Flora Chaldean—the intermediary who had brought me to Gramarye. She had her own special goodness. I moved her aside.

Mycroft had backed away against the mantelshelf, and dust was still billowing from the fireplace below, sweeping upward to form a sooty mist around him. How could I ever have described his appearance as bland? With his baleful eyes and his shoulders hunched, hands held in front of him like claws, his mouth a downward grimace and face, now etched with lines where there had been none before, smeared by the dust—Jesus, he looked like a resident of the nightmare I'd just left.

He was failing, though, his bag of tricks had so far come to nothing; and he obviously found that hard to take. Yeah, it's true to say he looked not only disheveled, but deranged too. I liked that: I was sick of his smugness. But there was life in the bastard yet.

He waved his hands and created a wall of vermin between us, their bristling, filth-haired bodies literally forming the brickwork (did I mention before?—I hate bloody rats!), piled five feet high, so that I could see only Mycroft's head beyond, as though perched on top of the twitching fur like a manic Humpty Dumpty.

More panic among the Synergists—they didn't care for the image either.

The wall toppled when I pictured a demolition ball hurtling into it, and the rats scurried in all directions, fading before they reached cover.

I smiled at him, ignoring the turmoil around me.

He split the air in front of me so that a widening rent of absolute nothingness appeared; a fierce wind endeavored to suck me into the void.

I sealed the opening with imaginary stitches.

"I'm younger than her, Mycroft!" I shouted across at him, and he knew I meant Flora. "I can take all the stress and strain you put my way. Young and fresh to all this, you see! It doesn't hurt a bit!"

Would I never learn? I stepped back when some of those things I thought I'd left behind in the nether region began crawling from the holes created in the floor. Carpet was ripping explosively all around me, and sluglike monsters oozed over the edges in shiny slimes. Hands that were scabbed and dripping pus clawed at the frayed carpet in an effort to drag the rest of their forms out into the open. Those membranes, full of wriggling life, quivered their snouts in the air before curling over the edge. Wispy black smoke tendrils drifted up in lazy spirals, and these were full of diseased microorganisms, the corrupting evil that roamed the depths, subversives that searched for ways to surface, intent on finding exposure, definition—actuality. These were the infiltrating substances of evil.

I sagged, went down onto my knees, because their existence depended on me also; I was their source, and they sapped my strength.

Kinsella was on his knees too, close to one of the growing holes, hands clasped between his thighs (now I understood how Midge had got away from him) and the thing that had coiled around my ankle when I'd been lost in that brief but eternal nightmare of my lower mind was reaching from the opening and circling his.

He shrieked and beat hard at the glistening cord with his fists. It shrank away, retreating into its pit, and Kinsella pushed himself on hands and knees across the room, blubbering as he went.

Shapes were emerging that even Mycroft seemed afraid and in awe of; they were muddied and grimed, as if squeezed from the earth that was beneath the round room.

Wind rushed by me, catching my hair and clothes; others around the room were falling, wailing, clutching those near them for mutual support. The electric glows were more intense, as though radiation hot. Furniture was rising, books flew across the room. Midge's drawing easel smashed itself and a Synergist—I think it was Bone Man, I'm sure it was the Bone Man—against a wall.

And now the walls were cracking apart.

A body thudded down next to me, and suddenly Midge was pulling my face around to look at hers.

"You can stop them, Mike!" she shouted over the noise. "You can make them go back! You can stop Mycroft!"

"No, I don't know how! It's all a mistake, Midge, I'm the wrong person! I don't know how to use Magic!"

"You just think it, that's all you do! Gramarye will help! The forces are here—you only have to direct them!"

Could it be that simple, that easy? Voices—thoughts— told me it was, and the assertion whether spoken or insinuated was from those who had lived here before me, others who had been guardians, who had kept the power of this place, these grounds, for the Good. Not Flora alone, but those before her, others before them, going back to a time when this site was no more than a circular clearing in a dense forest, when maybe it was the era of dragons and wizards and white castles, the time of legends we think we invented. Maybe an age before even that.

I imagined those times and the imaginings expanded from my mind.

I yelled at those rising obscenities and they hesitated, began to slide away, back down to the slimy depths they'd climbed from. Back to the deepest realms of my own thoughts.

Gradually, another sound grew beneath the tumult, a drumming-fluttering, an underlying rhythm to the howling of the wind.

The chimney breast throbbed with their flight and once again the bats swept from the fireplace opening, screeching and swarming over Mycroft, beating him with their wings. In seconds, he was engulfed and they drove him against the mantel.

They covered almost every inch of him so that his image was akin to the creatures who were slinking back into their underworld.

A brilliance was in my mind, subduing the darkness that had threatened to overwhelm, a dawn defeating the night.

I struggled to my feet, Midge helping me, and Mycroft and I gazed into each other's eyes one last time before his face was enveloped by those feasting monsters. I've no idea what he'd felt for me: I'd only observed a vast emptiness in his eyes.

Blood flowed between the frantic bodies of the smothering bats, soaking them and trickling down to puddle the floor. They drained him while he stood there.

Through the hallway, the back door crashed open and shut, an enticing trap for those people trying to escape. Some made it outside, others were crushed against the frame, their broken bodies spat back into the hall like pips from a chomping mouth.

Cracks in the curved walls were widening and more bats were squeezing through, others entering by the smashed windows. They wheeled around the room, carried by the wind, swooping to attack exposed faces and hands. Bricks began to dislodge themselves, hurtling across the room like missiles.

Midge clutched my arm and pointed upward.

The ceiling was rising in the middle, becoming more warped, more bowed, than before. Floorboards ripped free of the carpet and lifted, blasting up to the ceiling's apex to collect there along with books, cushions and ornaments. The sofa began to rise, spinning in the air, only one corner remaining in contact with the floor. Several of the Synergists had become flattened against the crumbling walls as if in a fairground rotor. I felt gravitational pressure on myself, outward and upward, and had to stand firm and resist. Gramarye was shuddering down to its very roots (and God only knew where they were).

"We must get out!" Midge shouted, her hair whipped around her face. "Something even more terrible is going to happen here, I can feel it!"

Me too. I knew she was right. Forces had been revived, set free, were pounding through like an oil gusher, and I didn't have the know-how to cap the flow. Gripping each other tightly we staggered toward the stairway, leaving behind the carnage, the awful sight of Mycroft being emptied of blood, the pulped faces of those who'd been struck by stone or raked by bats, the gale that tore around the curved and breaking walls. All bathed in that eerie, electric gleam.

We were almost through the doorway when rough hands seized my throat from behind.

I was hauled backward, thrown to the roaring, erupting floor. Then a hefty weight on my chest was pinning me there, the hands at my neck now attacking from the front. Stunned at first, I opened my eyes to find our American Hero snarling at me and he didn't look so clean-cut any more. His nose and cheeks were smeared red, and there was a deep gash in his forehead, right across from corner to corner, blood soaking through in spurts. His blond hair was tangled and dusty; God knows how, but clumps of it had been torn out so that his scalp, pinky-blue in the unnatural light, showed through. The madness in his gaze confirmed he was a true disciple of Mycroft's.

I grabbed his wrists and tried to pull his hands away, but he only enjoyed my struggle, leering down at me and steadily increasing his own pressure.

Then Midge was on him, scoring his face with her fingers, catching the edge of the cut in his forehead and lifting the skin like a flap. The bone beneath was bloodied, hardly any white showing.

Kinsella smacked her aside easily with the back of his hand, ignoring his own pain and the blood flooding down to blind him. But the next bulky shape that lumbered forward wasn't so easy to dismiss.

A thick hand grasped him beneath the chin and jerked his head backward, continuing to pull as another hand chopped hard at his stretched windpipe. Spittle showered my face, but I didn't mind that in the least.

She tossed him away and, before he could raise himself from the floor, one of her heavy brogues crunched into his ring-of-confidence teeth. Val was playing for keeps.

She reached down for Midge and hauled her up, ducking as objects and bats flew over her head, then turned to help me; but I was already lurching to my feet.

The room was exploding around us, the middle section of floor completely gone, many of the remaining floorboards angled upward and waving like stiffened streamers; earth and mud was spewing from the opening, spraying the domed ceiling with their dirt. Brickwork was dropping from the walls in huge chunks too massive to be borne by the wind. Those Synergists who hadn't escaped—those not sprawled on the heaving floor—were clinging to the walls, unable to tear themselves free.

Val propeled Midge and me toward the doorway, as resolute and indomitable as ever, even though she was plainly scared out of her wits.

The back door still flapped wildly, inviting us to chance our luck, to beat the devil—you'd better be nimble, you'd better be quick.

"Through the kitchen!" commanded Val without even contemplating the challenge.

We rushed for the stairs as one, slipping on loose boards and carpet at the bend, the three of us tumbling down in a rolling avalanche of arms and legs. We came to an untidy halt near the bottom, and the walls were throbbing on either side of us.

We unraveled ourselves with much grunting and groaning and got going again, the noise from behind becoming even louder. We ran across the kitchen, Midge in the lead, the ceiling light dimming and brightening in quick succession. The floor tiles were all loose, rattling against each other like broken crockery, and it wasn't easy to keep our feet. Something caught my eye but I kept moving, pushed on from behind by Val. Midge threw open the front door and all three of us cleared the step with a jump, literally bursting from the cottage. We kept moving, racing down the path, flowers and weeds waving in the air on either side as if we were runners in the hundred meters, and we knew something catastrophic was about to happen back there, that the place was going to explode, or collapse, or be swallowed into the earth.

But I skidded to a halt halfway down the path.

Midge and Val were at the gate before they noticed I was missing.

"Mike!" Midge screamed back at me. "Keep going!" I shouted, then turned and ran back to Gramarye.

I could still hear her screaming my name as I plunged inside.