The Book of Dead Days (15 page)

“The intense pursuit of any idea that takes complete possession of me is one of the qualities that makes me different-sometimes for good, sometimes, I daresay, for evil-from other men. It was because I had a greater thirst for knowledge, a greater hunger and desire to know all that could be known, that I became interested in stranger aspects of these studies. Dark, strange knowledge. Hidden knowledge.

“And I soon learnt that our modern thinking is but half the story. That there is a hidden world of a precious and powerful nature that has been known for as long as man has been thinking and doing.

“In my stupidity and pride, I rushed to share this with my colleagues, but I was a fool, for they shunned me. The things I did were dark and powerful, yes, and they were afraid of me. They threw me out! They turned their backs on me! And I was disgraced.

“Their treatment only served to make me delve even deeper into these unknown forces. I worked long and hard and began to create things I should not have. I began to conjure powers that should not be known. I summoned them. Small spirits at first, then greater and greater life-forms, with the power to change the world if they so desired.

“I thought I could control them. I summoned these things from their hidden places and they did my bidding. Small matters like money were no problem. That was easy in those days. They did whatever I wished. Now I would not dare…”

He paused for a moment.

There were so many questions Boy longed to ask, but he did not want to break the spell. Willow, however, had the habit of asking.

“Why?” she said.

“There is something else,” said Valerian. “Someone else, I should say. A woman.

“She was fair, like the clear moon that shone down on my labors night after night. Her hair was long and blond like golden corn, but she always wore black. The beauty of this extreme drove me to distraction.

“Yes, she was beautiful. But more than that. Light danced behind her eyes, such eyes as I have never seen before nor since. Her voice sparkled like a glittering stream, and her mind was both sharp and playful.

“She was rich. Her father was a great and powerful nobleman. She was unattainable. She would never have noticed a nobody like me, thrown out even from my college. And so I resolved to make something of myself, to make myself powerful and rich and strong. Then she could be mine.

“And so, having learnt of a most powerful conjuration, I summoned a thing-a thing I should not have done- to help me, to grant my wishes. And so it did. But I was oblivious to the price for all the power and wealth I was granted.”

Valerian stopped again, wincing at a twinge of pain from his arm.

“Look at me now!” He fished in his pocket for the bottle. He drained the last few drops and threw the bottle over the side of the cart to land unheard in the thick snow. “A wreck! This cart may as well be taking my coffin to the ground as taking us to God-knows-where in this forsaken land.”

“Don’t say that!” cried Boy.

“No?” asked Valerian bitterly. “I have now a little over two days to live unless there’s a way out of this mess. I have not yet told you of the price I was set. I demanded power and wealth and I got them. I was granted the power to have her.

“In return, I gave my life. I did not realize it at first, even though the conditions were spelt out. I was given fifteen years. Fifteen years to use my power and money and make what I could with it, and at the end of which I would belong to the thing I summoned. My life is his. My body and soul are his. It is over, then. And it was almost exactly fifteen years ago that I made this pact, this bargain, deep in the forest. On New Year’s Eve.

“Do you think it’s strange to risk so much?”

Neither Boy nor Willow answered.

“I was blind. Love had made me blind, and I thought a night-even an hour with her would be enough. And I was arrogant, and certain that in fifteen years I would find a way out of the pact. How clever I was then! How stupid!

“As the years passed I grew older and wiser and doubt began to grow. I had spent all my money, and never again will I summon those powers to help me get more.”

Willow was about to ask Valerian the woman’s name, but Boy spoke first.

“And Kepler’s been helping you find a way out?”

Valerian nodded.

“So why didn’t you ask him for help sooner? Why wait until the last few years?”

Valerian spoke to Boy, but his gaze went right through him.

“Kepler and I had fallen out at the time of my making the pact. We… disagreed over something. We did not see each other for maybe ten years. But many things can be forgiven in time, and when I went to see him again he agreed to help me find the book.”

“What did you disagree about?” Boy asked.

A shadow crossed Valerian’s face. He chose to ignore this question, but some intuition told Willow it had something to do with the woman.

“My time is up,” he said. “My only chance lies with the book. I had heard of it, and when I told Kepler about it he spent many months finding out about it. His knowledge of ancient libraries is second to none. He gathered references to the book-a mention here, half a line there-until we learnt that if it still existed, it was probably in our very own City. Then we truly began to believe we might actually find the thing itself.

“It is a book full of such ancient and powerful knowledge that we believe it contains some spell or other way of breaking the contract I am under. Kepler firmly believes that it contains the answer. From his researches he discovered that it is not just pages with writing, information to be learnt, the mundane and the extraordinary. No, it is more than that. Kepler believes that the book is itself a magical device, and each person who looks into it learns something different-something about only themselves, the thing uppermost in their mind, the thing they most want to know…

“For five years we have been tracking it down. About a year ago we thought we had it. We were mistaken. Then a few months ago it was promised to us, and again we were tricked. Across the years many people have struggled to claim possession of it.

“I was relying on things happening more quickly than they have, but maybe there is still time. Maybe. Kepler was sure it would yield an answer. And despite… the things that occurred between us, he is my one salvation in all this.”

He broke off.

Willow watched him.

“Valerian?” she asked, brushing more flakes of snow from her hair.

“What?” His voice was faint.

“The woman. The woman you did it all for. What happened to her?”

Valerian lifted his head and his cold stare ran straight through Willow.

“She?” he said. “She… rejected me. Despite the enchantment, somehow she still rejected me. I never saw her again.”

There was silence.

Willow still wanted to know her name, but could not bring herself to speak. Boy wondered how someone could risk so much, face such horrors, enter such a pact, all for someone who would cast them away, but Willow, looking at Boy, could feel differently.

To risk everything for someone-that was something she understood.

“Boy,” she said, quietly, “I’m cold.”

“Come here,” he said, and put his arm around her.

Silence fell over them as the cart plowed on through the snowbound forest.

Boy felt a mixture of emotions, and none of them good-fear, horror, sadness, hopelessness. Willow felt pity, and dread.

And Valerian? Who knows what deep and dangerous thoughts ran through his disturbed mind?

Dead to everything around them, they plodded on through mile after mile of snow-laden silver birch forests. Dimly, it seemed to Boy impossible that there could be so many trees and that it could snow for so long. And yet the trees went on forever and so did the snow.

Willow kept a firm grip on the blanket spread across them. The rhythmic stagger of the cart lulled Boy into a half-sleep, in which the waking world and his troubled imagination fought for control. He plunged into a bizarre sequence of mind-pictures in which he was back in his favorite kind of place: a small, confined darkness. Yet there was horror somewhere nearby, something that wanted to be bad to him. He scurried deeper into the cramped black spaces until he felt safer only to feel the hunting presence coming closer and closer once more. In his perverse dreamworld he could feel himself being pulled further away from himself, until at last there was an answer and he
became
the small dark space himself, and in doing so was free.

And Valerian?

There was nothing. He slept as they went on through the paper-white trees, and the soft, deathly snow.

And yet… and yet, then there came the end to the trees.

Dusk was only an hour or so away when they emerged from the forest at last. Far off in the distance stood a wretched little village.

“Linden!” The driver spat.

Then, in a cracked and bleak voice, he began to sing, rousing them from their fitful sleep.

As he finished his dirge, they pulled into Linden. It was just a handful of houses, an old water mill and the odd barn. For some reason, however, it had an imposing and ancient church that towered in the dusk like a manmade mountain of cut stone.

There, past a rickety fence, lay their goal-the churchyard.

The driver pulled the horse to a stop.

“We shouldn’t need long,” Valerian said to him.

“I don’t care how long you need,” said the driver. “We can’t go back tonight.”

He got down and started to unhitch the horse from the cart.

Valerian turned to argue, but the old man cut him off.

“If you don’t get out of there before it’s unhitched you’ll fall off,” he grunted. “And by the look of your arm I don’t think you’d want that.”

Defeated, Valerian scrambled down, grimacing with pain as he reached the ground.

“Is it getting worse?” asked Willow.

“Do you have any left?” asked Boy, and Valerian pulled a final, somewhat larger bottle of Kepler’s magic drug from his pocket.

“That’s all,” he said forlornly. He turned to the driver, who was leading his horse over to one of the barns.

“Where are we to stay, then?”

The driver didn’t look back as he called, “You should have thought of that before you set out.”

He led the horse into the barn and the door closed. There was a time, Boy knew, not too long ago, when Valerian would have fought the driver, compelled him to do his bidding. But now Valerian was broken, nearly spent.

They looked around the village. Even in the fading light they could see it all from where they stood.

There were three houses, each standing by itself on a patch of land with a low wooden fence. Each had a variety of little shacks and outhouses clustered behind it, and vegetable gardens that ran down to where the fields proper started.

There was the water mill. It had a large millpond upstream, frozen solid and now covered in snow as well. The entire millrace seemed to be frozen, though water must have been moving underneath the icy surface. The wheel was still frozen fast, and long fingers of icicles hung down from the blades that in summer would have ducked powerfully into the water.

There were two large barns, into one of which the coach driver had vanished with his horse. The other was a little smaller. And there was the church.

There was no one around, though they could see firelight inside some of the windows and could hear the sounds of a village preparing to rest at the end of a winter’s day. A dog barked behind one of the houses. A rickety door slammed. They felt utterly alone.

“I don’t like the countryside,” said Willow.

“Hmm,” said Valerian. “It can be a little… quiet.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Boy. “Where are we going to sleep?”

“We’re not,” said Valerian. “The first thing to do is find what we came here for-the book. Then we’ll get a horse and take ourselves back.”

“You mean… steal one?” asked Willow.

“If we have to,” said Valerian. “I’ll be damned if I spend the night in this hole.”

He realized the other meaning of his words and fell silent.

It did not go well.

They made their way to the churchyard.

“We’ll need to find a spade,” said Valerian. “There’ll be something in the mill…”

He tripped and fell forward, landing on his knees.

Willow and Boy knelt beside him.

“Don’t fuss!” he snapped, and they jumped back.

He struggled to his feet, but this time when Boy and Willow each put a hand out to help him, he did not argue.

They staggered to the churchyard, where they leant Valerian against the wall on a low buttress that ran around the outside.

He shook his head.

“You’ll have to do it,” he whispered. He drank the first of his last bottle and pulled a face. “You two will have to do it.”

Boy and Willow looked at each other.

“Dammit!” cried Valerian. “I can’t move for pain. I can’t walk and I certainly won’t be able to dig. You’ll have to do it.”

They nodded in unison.

“Boy! Go to the mill. They must have some sort of shovel for moving the corn. Girl! Start looking. Remember, Gad Beebe is the-”

“Of course I remember,” said Willow. “I found the name for you!”

She glared at Valerian, who hung his head. He lifted his hand and waved them feebly away.

“Come on,” said Boy quietly.

The light was failing fast but there was just enough to see the names on the gravestones, though Willow had to scrape the snow off a few of them to be able to read the name of the grave’s occupant.