Drinking Midnight Wine (24 page)

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Authors: Simon R. Green

BOOK: Drinking Midnight Wine
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“How would you like to go after Jimmy Thunder again, my dear? You can learn a new thrill. It’s called revenge. You’ll like it.”
“But not yet, right?” said Angel pointedly.
“No,” said Hob. “Not just yet.”
He closed his eyes, just for a moment. He was deathly tired, after a hard day’s work raising the dead and summoning them to Blackacre, and he had hoped for a little peace and quiet this evening, a little rest, but he should have known better. Baby-sitting Angel was getting harder all the time. More of his father’s instructions, of course. No one realized just how much hard work there was in necromancy, how much concentration and willpower was required to pull the dead from their graves, walk them unseen through the town’s streets and then set them to guard the dead and empty woods of Blackacre. He had a fearful headache. The wine was helping to soothe it, but Angel very definitely wasn’t.
It was also hard work baby-sitting someone who could destroy the farmhouse and the woods and possibly the whole damned town, if she ever got angry enough to put her mind to it. He’d survive, of course, because he always did, but his father would be displeased with him, if he let Angel off the leash too soon. And just the thought of that was enough to make Hob shudder.
“Talk to me,” Angel said implacably. “Tell me what you’re feeling. It helps me understand what I’m feeling. You were thinking about your father just then, weren’t you? I can tell. When you speak of him, I hear only hatred in your voice. Love and hatred are different, yes? One is good, one is bad. I have trouble making such distinctions. I have so few references to set them against. You don’t want to do what you’re doing now, but you do it anyway. Why?”
“No, this isn’t what I’d rather be doing,” Hob said tiredly. “But I don’t have any choice in the matter. Like so many only sons, I inherited the family business. Mine just happened to be Evil. Luckily, I’m rather good at it, but still ... I had to follow in my father’s footsteps. Carry out his plans and ambitions. It was expected of me.”
“What did you want to be?” said Angel, studying him with her unblinking crimson eyes.
“I never got the chance to find out,” said Hob. “All my life I’ve danced to my father’s tune, one way or another. Rarely had any time to myself. I’ve always been alone. No close family, or friends, or . . . lovers. Love isn’t for the likes of me. Anyway, being the Hob is a full-time job. Women have been drawn to me, down the years, for various reasons. Ambition, usually. Villains and adventurers and the occasional romantic who saw herself as consort to my Prince of Evil. It’s always the bad boy that makes a girl’s heart beat that little bit faster. I’ve known companionship, but never love. Sex, but never tenderness. Alliances, but never friends . . . There were even a few women brave enough to try to use me for their own ends. I think I liked them the best. But no matter why they came to me, it always ended badly, for them and for me. I try to have fond memories of some of them, for the few bright moments they brought into my life. I have known some remarkable women. Sweet Susie Slaughter, also known as The Suffering. What times we had, in Revolutionary France, dancing in the blood around the guillotines. Then there was Crow Jane, the Eidolon. I had to kill her. Twice. It was for her own good. And not to forget dear Annie Abattoir of London’s East End, the scheming little minx. I hammered a stake right through her cheating heart.”
“Ah,” said Angel. “She was a vampire.”
“No.” Hob stared moodily into his empty glass. “They always end up leaving me, one way or another. Sometimes I just outlive them. Humans are such transitory things. Another of the damned tricks fate played on me, making me what I am. Just human enough to tease me with thoughts and dreams of things I can never have, and not quite monster enough not to care. Doomed to live among mortals, while ensuring I can never share the sweet, passing joys they all take for granted. And so I hurt the world, as it hurts me, every day.” He smiled humorlessly at Angel. “You don’t understand a damned thing I’ve said to you, do you? And that’s probably why I can talk to you like this. Because you can never use it against me.”
“I understand what it is, to be alone,” Angel said slowly. “Ever since I first fell to earth, I’ve found nothing and no one who can match what I am, let alone what I was. Except perhaps you. You are my anchor. A rock I can cling to, in a storm of things that make no sense to me. Your singular nature is comforting. Emotions confuse me, especially those connected with love. Sexuality. Sensuality. I know the words, but . . . I feel things I don’t understand. Don’t know what to do with.” She leaned forward suddenly, and slowly stroked the side of Hob’s face with the back of her hand. He sat very still as she ran a single soft fingertip down his face, from brow to cheek to chin, and then back to his lips, frowning as she concentrated on the sensation of skin touching skin. Hob was careful not to react in any way. This close, Angel was like some dangerous animal from the wild, some unknown creature that might do anything, anything at all. The hand that touched him so lightly was the same hand that had punched holes through the solid stone walls of the railway station. He didn’t think she could really damage him, but still . . . Angel took her fingertip away from his lips and held it up before her, studying it closely, and Hob allowed himself to breathe a little more easily. He controlled Angel only because she let him, and more and more just lately he was beginning to think she knew that. Angel sniffed her fingertip and then licked it, but there was no more to it than some great cat licking its paw. Angel shrugged suddenly and let her hand fall.
“The Serpent,” she said calmly, as though nothing of any note had happened. “Your father. The Serpent In The Sun, the Old Enemy. Have you ever seen him? Do you know what he really is?”
“No,” said Hob, and was pleased at how calm and steady his voice was. “As far as I know, the only person ever to see my father in the flesh, so to speak, was my dear mother, and the experience drove her quite mad. Sometimes I hear my father’s voice, in my mind. When he wants to give me orders. And that is always . . . unpleasant. His voice is awful, unbearable. Overwhelming. There’s nothing human about the Serpent. He’s so much bigger than that. No one knows much about The Serpent In The Sun, not really. Most of the world’s religions have taken a guess or two, down the centuries. I’ve read up on most of them, and I’m no wiser. All anyone knows for sure, from records that predate Humanity, is that my father was the Firstborn, the very first living consciousness in the solar system. Everything else came after him; all the Powers and Dominations, all the lesser presences, all the way down to poor benighted Humanity. Sometimes I wonder—”
Hob convulsed in his chair, his wineglass flying from his spasming hand. He cried out in pain, a terrible, animal sound, and then his mouth snapped shut, forced into a grinning rictus by the straining muscles of his face. His whole body was shaking and twisting now, seized by an outside force that racked him unmercifully. He screamed behind his locked teeth, and tears flew from his wide-stretched eyes. The convulsions grew worse, throwing him from his chair, and he crashed helplessly to the floor, unable even to put out his arms to break his fall. He hit the floor hard, twitching and shuddering all over as his limbs flailed wildly.
His body stretched unnaturally, muscles tearing and bones cracking, as his shape and form altered violently, struggling to contain something from outside, something too big and too strange for the human form to accommodate. Hob was crying out all the time now, awful animal sounds of unbearable pain and horror, forced out of a twisting mouth. His body grew and shrank in sudden spurts, convulsing muscles tearing themselves free from bones that couldn’t transform fast enough. He still looked basically human, but moment by moment he was leaving that state behind, his whole being racked by invasive, inhuman energies. Tears ran down his face in sudden jerks and streamings. Hob reached out one hand, with its crooked, foot-long fingers, in helpless supplication to . . .
someone
.
Above it all, a great Voice filled the rotten room, loud beyond bearing, terrible beyond belief and utterly inhuman. It spoke in a tongue beyond all human languages, or perhaps the root of them all, unknowable, unfathomable, to anyone in the mortal world except the Serpent’s Son. Angel flinched back in her chair just at the sound of it, not understanding a word and yet somehow drawn to it, as though it reminded her of some other tongue, from her time before this world. The Voice was as loud as thunder, an earthquake or a volcano, and just as implacable, a force that could not be denied.
And then, at last, the message came to an end. The Voice was gone, and the only sounds in the dead room were the quiet creakings of muscle and bone as Hob’s body slowly returned to normal, and his exhausted, pitiful sobbing. Even after his human shape was restored, he lay curled up on the filthy floor, crying and whimpering and hugging himself tightly, as though to stop himself from falling apart. The great and mighty Nicholas Hob, sobbing like a hurt child.
Angel looked down at him from her chair. In all her short time in the material world, she had never seen anything so clearly evil, so remorselessly cruel and malevolent, done by one living creature to another. She rose slowly from her chair and knelt beside the shaking, helpless Hob. And without quite knowing why, she took him in her arms and held him to her. She held his face gently to her breast, and his tears soaked her black rags. She’d never seen him so weak, so helpless. She felt helpless, too—not something she was used to feeling. She tried to comfort Hob, in her own awkward, ignorant way, and in her helpless anger at what had been done to him she found a new, different link between herself and Hob; that in the end, for all their power, they were both at the mercy of forces greater than themselves.
Finally Hob stopped shaking, and after a while he stopped crying, too, or perhaps he just ran out of tears. He lay limply in Angel’s arms, his head still resting on her bosom. His breathing gradually slowed to something like normal, and tears and sweat no longer dripped off his chin.
“He always hurts me,” he said quietly. “My father. When he talks to me. I may be his son, but I’m still mostly only human. Sometimes I think he hurts me deliberately, unnecessarily, just to remind me who’s in charge. There’s never been any love between my father and me, in either direction. I’m just here to carry out his orders. I’d love to hurt him, the way he hurts me, love to punish him. Kill him. But I never will. I can’t even defy him. I’ve tried to outthink him, outmaneuver him, but in the end, as old as I am, with all my hard-earned experience and knowledge, he is immeasurably older and far more powerful. The Serpent. The Old Enemy.” Hob sounded horribly tired to Angel, hurt and defeated, even broken. She held him a little tighter, and tried to understand why. Hob sounded like a small child, beaten for reasons he could never hope to understand. Angel lowered her head next to his, to catch his last quiet words. “I’ll never be my own man, never be free. Never be anything more than my father’s bloody puppet!”
He started to cry again, helpless with rage and frustration, and suddenly he pounded one fist against the floor, till the skin on his knuckles broke and blood flew on the air. Angel reached out and restrained his bloody hand with her own. Hob raised his face to look at her, and for a long moment they stared into each other’s eyes. Something passed between them, something new to both of them. And then Hob began trying to sit up, and Angel immediately let him go. She knew better than to help him, as he forced himself back onto his feet and then collapsed into his chair. She resumed her seat on the other side of the coffee table. Neither of them said anything.
Hob remembered how it all began.
 
The Serpent saw Angel fall. Saw her plunge through the shimmering realms, down and down and finally out into the material, and Mysterie. He watched as she burned across the sky like a meteor, at last plummeting to earth like a falling star, landing with a crash that shook the world in more ways than one. The Serpent then spoke to his son, Hob, and told him to go to a certain place and retrieve what he found there. Which was how, just under a year ago, Nicholas Hob came to be standing beside his elegant and powerful car, deep in the heart of southwest England, looking dubiously at the ancient burial mound known as Silbury Hill.
There was a cold wind blowing, though up until now it had been a hot and muggy day. He hunched his shoulders inside his long leather coat and flexed his fingers inside his heavy driving gloves. He didn’t like being back at Silbury Hill. It had been seven hundred years since he’d last been here, and the place still disturbed the crap out of him. To the casual eye it was just another burial mound, big enough to be named a hill but otherwise unremarkable. Even the legends surrounding it were pretty generic. That the mound held the body of some ancient chieftain, along with his treasures. Or perhaps it was the secret tomb of some great and potent hero, sleeping in majesty, waiting to be called forth again in the time of England’s greatest need. There’d been several fairly major invasive digs here in this century alone, but no traces of a tomb or a body or treasure had ever been found. The legends persisted. Of King Sil, or the King in Gold, or The Rider On The White Horse.
Hob knew the truth. That the mound was thousands of years older than that. He knew what was really buried there, deep and deep in the cold wet earth, held down by the weight of the mound, wrapped in iron chains blessed with terrible prayers and curses, doomed and damned to lie deep in the ground till Judgment Day, and perhaps beyond.
Grendel Rex, the Unforgiven God.

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