Tales From The Wyrd Museum 1: The Woven Path (22 page)

Ted looked at her hopefully. ‘D’you mean there's still a chance?’ he cried. ‘I thought you was welchin’.’

‘Oh, there's always a slight possibility for threads to slip from the tapestry,’ she replied, ‘it would never be entertaining if there was no prospect of that.’

‘I adore it when a stitch always goes astray,’ Miss Celandine broke in, ‘sometimes I drop them just to see what’ll happen.’

‘She is talking about stitches?’ Ted asked wryly.

‘Exactly,’ Miss Ursula concurred, ‘that really is the correct description of you, Edward, a dropped stitch in the fabric of our weaving. You are a stitch in time, and you know what they can do. But you may not count on our help again, the ordeals that lie before you must be resolved on your own merit. The lives of those you hold dear depend solely on how sharp your wits are.’

The bear leaned confidently back against the instruments with his paws behind his head. Then it'll be a piece of cake,’ he grinned. ‘I can do that blindfold.’

‘You might not find it quite so easy as you think,’ she snorted, ‘for a circumstance has occurred that could prove ruinous for us all.’

Startled by the gravity of her voice, Ted blinked at the white-haired pilot and sat bolt upright.

‘It is entirely your fault of course,’ Miss Ursula scolded him. 'You were slipshod and careless.’

‘What'd I do?’ he muttered, unsettled by her censorious gaze.

'The gateway,’ she said scornfully. ‘Did we not instruct you in its ways and what had to be done?’

'That daffy gizmo was all over the place!’ he cried defensively. ‘I know it made a mess and broke a few bits an’ pieces but you can't make an omelette...’

‘I am not talking of broken furniture!’ she proclaimed.

‘What a topsy-turvy mess there was!’ Miss Veronica butted in.

Her sister glared at her. ‘Edward,’ she said, summoning her dwindling reserves of patience, ‘You were not alone when you journeyed back.’

‘I know, that Neil kid—he ain't so bad...’

‘I do not refer to the Chapman maggot,’ she breathed.

Then what?’

Miss Ursula narrowed her eyes. ‘Something that should have been banished from this world in the great long ago, along with the lords of the ice,’ she uttered mysteriously. ‘Something which must never be allowed its freedom. That is why we were entrusted with its keeping, to ensure that it could never harry the living land again.’

‘One of your Separate goodies,’ he groaned, ‘am I right?’

‘Celandine, show him.’

The flight engineer unfurled the prodigious length of knitting that was folded upon her knee and held it up in front of her face.

Within the enchanted depths of the ravelled wool, the livid shades of green swirled and pulsed as the strands of silver tinsel sparkled and shimmered. But, as Ted stared, he saw that two ugly, ragged holes had been cut into the knitted cloth and Miss Celandine's beady, black eyes peeped through them sorrowfully.

'The pattern is marred,’ Miss Ursula said, ‘the weave is no longer perfect. For each of those holes there was a life, yet those lives have been ripped from Celandine's web and there is nothing we can do to retrieve them.’

‘You sayin’ that what I brought back did this?’

Ted swallowed, 'The thing from your collection? Which... which one was it?’

Miss Ursula fixed him with her gaze and said quite simply, ‘Belial.’

‘Aw Jeez!’ the bear moaned, smacking his head with his paw. ‘Why couldn't it have been the frog bones? You tellin’ me this critter's got outta his box?’

‘Most assuredly,’ she replied, ‘the demon is at liberty and, if he is not dealt with, then Celandine's labours will become nothing more than a few straggling threads.’

‘You're not suggestin’ I bump him off?’ Ted asked suspiciously.

‘Don't be absurd,’ Miss Ursula snapped.

‘You can't kill him!’ Miss Veronica laughed.

‘He must be returned to the casket,’ her sister said, ‘that is your only hope. His dark essence can never be utterly vanquished, it is written that Belial shall one day pour fire down upon the earth and destroy its foundations. All you have to do is ensure that the day in question is delayed for as long as possible. That must not happen until after the remaining root is destroyed and the cold returns.’

‘Wait a minute!’ the bear cried, defiantly waving his arms in the air. 'This weren't part of the deal, I ain't messin’ with no thousand-year-old boogie man.’

‘Oh, he's far, far older than that,’ Miss Ursula informed him, ‘older even than us.
Beliya'al—
whose name means “without worth’. He is an unclean spirit, his continued freedom is an incident which ought never to have occurred and cannot be tolerated and it is up to you to secure his return to us.’

‘No way, you gotta be off your rocker, lady!’

'Then both the woman and her child will die,’ she said.

Ted glowered at her, then hung his head in defeat. 'What've I gotta do?’ he burbled.

Miss Ursula clicked her fingers and Miss Celandine took from her knitting bag a tiny phial of pale green glass.

‘Here are the last drops of the divine water drawn from my well before it was drained,’ Miss Ursula said, taking it from her and passing it to the bear.

‘Do not waste it, for the liquid is exceedingly precious. The world-tree itself was nourished by the same water.’

‘Rootbeer, eh?’ Ted murmured, raising the small bottle to his nose and giving it a wary sniff. ‘Has the critter gotta drink this?’

‘Sprinkle but a drop upon the demon and he shall be rendered harmless,’ said Miss Ursula.

‘Yeah,’ Ted muttered sarcastically, ‘like all I gotta do is get close enough.’

‘You will find a way.’ she assured him, ‘Belial must be returned to the museum in the prison fashioned for him by the fathers of Israel. Now, our time with you grows short. You must guard that phial at all costs.’

‘Where am I s'posed to stash it? I ain't got no pockets!’

Miss Ursula reached over and took hold of the bear's soft body. Deftly, she searched through his fur for the seam and with her fingernails, snapped a thread.

‘Hey!’ Ted yelled as she unpicked the stitches. ‘Ya could've asked. Ooch, that smarts!’

“Until you find him,’ she said, pushing the phial down into the bear's stuffing, ‘let that remain hidden. Veronica, attend to Edward's seam.’

Scowling, Ted stood on the instrument panel, whilst Miss Veronica took out a needle and thread and zealously sewed up the fluffy gap.

‘I feel as though I swallowed a baseball bat,’ he complained, prodding his lumpy stomach uncomfortably.

‘Now we must return,’ Miss Ursula declared.

The faces of her two sisters fell in unison. ‘Oh, Ursula!’ they whinged. ‘Just a little longer.’

The woman ignored them and, with a parting glance at Ted, said, ‘Remember, he who is without worth is sustained by feeding on human souls. Two he has devoured already and is now much stronger than when first he crept from the casket. This is a perfect moment in history for him and one which he shall use to his best advantage. What better time could he have escaped into? A world torn by war. That is a condition he knows only too well. You, Edward, are not immune from his appetite. On the contrary, the fiercer the soul burns, the more palatable Belial will find it. A tasty morsel indeed would you make—have a care when you encounter him. He is a lord of deceit and wears many guises.’

‘Mebbe ya shoulda rammed some garlic in with that bottle,’ the bear joked feebly—but already the Webster sisters were gone.

Captain Jimmy Resnick gave a retching cough as he sluggishly came to.

Suddenly his eyes snapped open.

‘What the hell?’ he bellowed, seizing hold of the controls and staring out of the window at the fields and hills below. ‘What happened? What's goin’ on here?’

Bounding through the plane and clambering over Angelo's body, up to the desk, Ted paused to whisper in the stirring radio operator's ear.

‘Well, Signorelli,’ the bear hissed, ‘it's up to you an’ me now.’ Groggily, Angelo shook his head and peered around him, looking for the person who had spoken, but saw no one except the rest of the slowly recovering crew.

In the tail section, Frank Jeffries lowered his eyes and gritted his teeth vehemently. He had come round more swiftly than the others and to his dismay he had beheld Angelo's teddy bear come hopping from the flight deck.

‘Lord in heaven!’ he whimpered pitifully. ‘I'm goin’ crazy. Oh Kathy, I gotta see you again, oh God—I can't go through this again! I just can't—I gotta get out, I gotta get out!’

Covent Garden market was still quiet when Kathleen Hewett stole up Long Acre, past the empty crates and carts that rustled with starving rats out on scavenging excursions. The alarming shadow of a solitary market porter carrying a teetering stack of baskets on his head loomed unexpectedly from the dark and she quickened her steps to avoid speaking to him.

Into a pinched, cramped alleyway she hastened, keeping the pathetic beam of her torch trained on the ground.

A lithe, furry body suddenly darted into her path and the girl drew her breath as the slimy rodent dived into a pile of boxes, wriggling into their cosy shelter.

Kath cursed herself for being afraid of the creature, then peered around her. The doorway was around here somewhere.

'JEROME'S ALL NIGHT SNACKER' was a greasy, unhealthy little dive. The faded board outside the shuttered windows declared to the world that it regularly opened at eleven o'clock at night and closed at seven the following morning, but during those bleary-eyed hours, it was never frequented by more than a few shady customers. The proprietor always chuckled to himself when some uninformed fool strayed inside and asked for something to eat.

Not one of the market porters ventured inside the putrid cafe's unwelcoming door, for the tepid, gritty, brown water served up as coffee swam with globules of unidentifiable oil and the origin of the snacks were even more dubious.

Yet night after night, Jerome's was open. Sitting quietly and unobtrusive in the deep blackout, like a slowly rotting apple, hidden amongst a barrel of sweeter, incorrupt produce. Steadily mouldering away, and storing up a rank reservoir of decay to spoil those around it when the time was overripe.

Sneaking a furtive glance around her, Kath strode up to the grimy door, pushed against the peeling paint and slipped inside.

The interior of the cafe was a poky little cesspit, dingily illumined by two naked light bulbs that appeared to discharge a dirty brown glow over every smudged and fat-spattered surface. A row of three tables, strewn with cigarette ash and circled with old mug stains, led to the serving counter where a hulking Neanderthal brute leaned over a newspaper, not bothering to raise his eyes when the girl entered.

At the middle table a hunched, ferret-faced old man wearing a cap and scruffy coat stared up from the dregs in his cup and directed a loathsome leer in Kath's direction.

Ignoring him completely, but aware of his ogling eyes following her every move, she ducked under a string of ancient and crowded flypapers that hung from the mildew-spotted ceiling, like some repulsive and unhygienic bunting, and walked to the counter.

The proprietor continued to read the newspaper. He was a huge tank of a man, who resembled a slothful animal kept in too small a cage. His shiny black hair was scraped flat against his big-boned skull and gave off a scent that suggested there was as much lard groomed into it as masked the crusting tiles behind him.

The sleeves of the thug's shirt were rolled up past his fat elbows, revealing badly-drawn tattoos that blotched and discoloured his skin. An unwashed apron was tied round his waist, abstractedly besmirched with untold slops and spills, and on his right hand he wore a viciously spiked ring that had slashed many a face in the scuffles and brawls that regularly found him.

But this intimidating sub-species of humanity did not daunt Kathleen Hewett. Slapping her hand down upon the newspaper to gain his attention she returned the ruthless glare that burned out at her from beneath the ape-like brow, until the man averted his eyes and gruffly jerked a dirty thumb towards a door at the back of the cafe.

'In there,' his voice rumbled from some unknown region deep in his chest.

Without thanking him, Kath pushed through the hinged section of the counter and passed into the room beyond.

The greenroom, as it was euphemistically termed in keeping with the director's coded analogy, was mostly dark. A single, shaded bulb blasted a circle of brilliant light on to a plain wooden chair in the centre of this slightly larger space. Before this spot-lit seat was a tidy office desk, identical to those used by solicitors and accountants throughout the city and, sitting with his hands clasped between the in and out-trays, was a small, bespectacled man in a grey flannel suit.

'Close the door behind you,' his clipped, disparaging voice commanded.

The girl did as he instructed and crossed to the chair, where she sat blinking in the harsh overhead.

Mr Ormerod, although that was not his real name, was an insignificant squirt of a man, as unremarkable and unassuming as any thousand you might pass in the street. This mundane and commonplace quality made him an ideal choice for the role his superiors had selected him for, and the prosaic creature took great pleasure in wielding this delicious authority.

His face and hands were as pink as a piglet and his thinning, grey hair was trim and, unlike the oaf outside, anointed with a tonic that smelled incredibly sweet and fragrant—like pulpy raspberries mingled with cherry blossom.

He was a man of particular habit and this was shown in various ways. From the fastidious manner in which he folded his spotless handkerchief and returned it to his breast pocket—after dabbing away the pearls of perspiration that glittered on his top lip—to the neat arrangement of pens and pencils laid out in regimented fines on the desk.

When he spoke, a tyre of babyish skin alternately bulged and contracted over his tightly-buttoned collar and, at times of extreme concentration or effort, his reptilian eyes had been known almost to protrude from their lashless lids and push against the glass of his half-moon spectacles.

'You're punctual tonight, at least,' he commented, glancing at a pocket watch and leafing through a sheaf of papers—buckled at the edges where his permanently damp fingers had held them, 'What have you got for me?'

Closing her eyes to visualise the details more clearly in her mind, Kath collected the relevant files she had committed to memory and began speaking in an educated, cultured voice, totally alien to the chirpy, cockney character that had been allocated to her.

First she related the gossip she had heard in the American nightclub she had visited that evening, however trivial it might have sounded. Reports of troop movements, rumours concerning weapons deployment, quartermaster's supplies and numbers of men—Kathleen repeated it all and Mr Ormerod jotted it down.

Then she told him everything she had learned during the past week at the munitions factory where she worked. Work rotas, the amount of explosives stored there at any one time, together with its possible destination.

Page after page of Mr Ormerod's notebook was diligently filled by his spidery handwriting, pausing only when his lip became too wet and droplets of sweat dripped on to the paper. During one of these intervals, when he was blotting up the trickling, salty moisture, Kath steeled herself and spoke the thought that had gnawed away at her all afternoon.

'Mr Ormerod,' she said, 'this week the transportation of another three consignments had been delayed. A considerable amount of explosives and ammunition is now stored in the factory warehouse.'

'I have already ascertained that from the rest of your statement,' he stated coldly, peering over the brim of his glasses. 'Have you any further information to add?'

The girl shifted in the uncomfortable chair and leaned forward, overcome by a patriotic fervour.

'Might I ask if this intelligence will be acted upon?' she questioned. 'On the last occasion I told you of a similar delay, nothing was done about it. These occurrences are extremely rare, the timing could never be better. All I need is your authorisation and I shall undertake the task myself—there are enough explosives there to rip a vast chunk out of the landscape.'

Mr Ormerod's antiseptic gaze left her and he meticulously aligned his papers. 'You are too anxious to prove yourself,' he said, 'it is not up to you to dictate which is a valid stage and which is not.'

'But in this I am certain!' she hotly answered. The factory is surrounded by residential buildings. Think of it—the number of civilian casualties would be phenomenal. What a blow that would be to British morale. If no action is taken soon, then it will be too late!'

'Then so be it!' he argued, his voice rising to a piggish squeal. 'You are only a common little prompter! Collect and pass on information—that is the sum of your function. Nothing more!'

Kathleen pushed the table angrily, causing the man's pencils to go clattering to the floor and she knew she had gone too far.

Not waiting to mop up the sweat dribbling from his top lip, Mr Ormerod rose from his seat and rushed round the table, raising his small, pink hand to bring it slapping down across the girl's cheek.

Kath withstood the pain and humiliation of the blow in shamed silence, defying her stinging skin and forbidding her eyes to moisten. When she looked back at her stage manager, a livid red mark of his child-sized palm was already throbbing on her cheek but she refused to submit.

Panting unpleasantly, Mr Ormerod wiped his entire face with the handkerchief before returning it unfolded to his breast pocket.

'Do not overreach yourself!' his shrill voice shrieked. 'Many others have attempted that most unwise policy. They were dealt with in the same fashion as the ones from whom they took their identities. Do I have to impress it upon you in plainer terms?'

The girl sullenly shook her head and, in the clipped German of her native tongue, apologised to him.

'I don't think you would find it agreeable to join the poor little land girl, who was the real Kathleen Hewett, in an unmarked grave, would you? I thought not.'

Flushed with the unaccustomed outburst of emotion, he returned to his seat and took deep breaths, putting considerable strain on the top button of his shirt.

'Never forget,' he hissed in a repugnant breath, 'that without me, you are nothing. None of you, not even the leading roles and star turns, can perform without me. I am the stage manager, the only one who can assimilate and organise. How long have you been in the profession?'

'Almost two years.'

'I have lived here for twenty-one,' he bragged, 'and in that time I have become a respectable, conservative citizen of the Empire who condemned Moseley and his crew with the same public voice I now reserve for the Führer. Why, in... the district I now reside, I'm even a member of the Home Guard—so I don't need a hot-headed novice like you, who hasn't even made it to the chorus, trying to tell me my responsibilities. I shall be here long after your useful days have either come to an end or have been brought to a rather swifter conclusion by either faction.'

Kath bore this tirade in meek servility and, when Mr Ormerod was done, she asked if she was free to go.

'Usual read-through next week,' he reminded her as she made for the door. 'Oh, and before you depart,' he added sourly, 'the producers were greatly pleased with the information concerning this morning's bombing raid. A bouquet and a critics' award to you.'

'My aim is to serve,' she said, 'there was not time to inform you.'

'Was there not—I wonder? Are you not familiar with the emergency contact number?'

'And the code.'

Then make certain you use it next time, I have always said that to give someone in the wings access to sound equipment is counterproductive, only harm can come of such folly.'

'I will remember on the next occasion.'

'I do hope so—only, I have been compelled to alter the codeword or perhaps I ought to say words. It is now "over-ambitious fraulein", I'm positive you will not forget that.'

Suffering this last insult, the girl forced a polite goodbye from her lips then left the greenroom, leaving Mr Ormerod hissing through his teeth.

*

Angelo Signorelli traipsed wearily through the deserted streets and gave a whistle of relief when he eventually found Barker's Row.

Jumping over the garden wall of the end house, and cussing when he realised he had leaped straight into a compost heap, he slowly made his hurdling way to number twenty-three.

A perfect peace lay over the garden of the late Peter Stokes. In their tiny hut the chickens dozed serenely—not waking even when the American lost his shoe in the potato patch and took his irritation out on the woody stalks of last year's Brussels sprouts.

Brushing the soil from his trousers, Angelo crept towards the mound at the bottom of the garden where the ghostly tendrils of the strawberry plants hung over the entrance to the Anderson shelter.

Stealthily, he descended to the doorway and hissed softly, his breath gusting from his mouth in clouds of steam.

'Jean,' he called, 'Jean, you in there?'

The lieutenant waited a moment, then called her name again.

Inside the shelter there came the sound of disturbed sleep as Jean Evans turned drowsily and murmured to Daniel to keep quiet.

'No, Jean,' Angelo said a little louder, 'it's me.'

The woman's dazed voice floated to him from the snug dark. 'What're you doing out there?'

'Mind if I come in?'