Exeunt Demon King Read online

  “When I go down, Mother Goose, you’ll be carried on my back. If I go below without you, then I’m sure to get the sack! Then I exit, stage left.”

  I am attached to my dignity, I am well aware of it. Needs must, however.

  Mollified, Curry closed the script. “Indeed you do. Exeunt Demon King.”

  I may have winced. “Exit,” I corrected him. I know a job interview is hardly the time to be correcting the Latin grammar of one’s potential employer, but, really, sometimes diplomacy be damned. “The stage direction should be Exit Demon King.”

  He looked at me with an uncomprehending frown upon his rounded brow. “It’s Latin,” he said after some seconds of thought.

  “Yes,” I said. “Exit is singular. Exeunt is in the plural.”

  “It’s Latin,” he said again. His frown was not an aggressive thing, but constructed from purest confusion. “Exeunt. It means exit. In Latin.”

  “There is only one Demon King exiting. Therefore, it should be exit.” Even as I said it, I knew I was wasting my time.

  “It’s Latin,” he said once more.

  I decided to cut my losses. “Is it?” I said with feigned astonishment. “Latin, you say? Well, I never. You have educated me, Mr Curry.”

  The brow unfurled. Order was restored in the wide open spaces of Curry’s intellect. “Your delivery needs some work,” he said.

  “I can deliver perfectly well. Organise a dress rehearsal. I shall demonstrate.”

  And so he did. The rehearsal was not an artistic triumph. I did not know my marks to ‘hit them,’ and there had been some extemporisation on top of the original script. Further, the rest of the cast seemed loath to come near me. Perhaps they thought bad luck was now attached to the role. Theatre folk are indeed a superstitious crew, not to say vain, stupid and unhygienic.

  Perhaps, however, their reticence was due to my performance. Although this was in my early days and I was not even technically a necromancer at that point, I had still had the very mild fortune to meet a couple of demons. One had been weasely and apologetic but the other had been impressive in its air of wanting very badly to slowly shred every scrap of meat from my bones and eat my soul for dessert. Its every syllable had dripped with a patient malevolence, masking an incandescent capacity for brutality. I simply impersonated it. As we took our bows before an auditorium empty but for Mr Curry, he clapped slowly and uncertainly. “Mr Cabal,” he said, “do you think you might tone that down a little? It’s very good, very… original, but perhaps a little much for the kiddies?”

  I was privileged to receive a changing room of my own. Actually, I think the rest of the cast insisted upon it. Almost all my entrances were through the star trap and the room was conveniently down in the cellar, by the props store and the trap platform. It smelt of damp and mice down there, but I wasn’t intending to stay with the production for long, just until I had concluded my investigations. The whole acting conceit had occurred to me quite suddenly and, once it had done so, I appreciated the elegance of it. Curry was on the watch for reporters possibly defaming his theatre’s safety record and he would have given thrill-seekers and nosy types even shorter shrift. If he had got even the whiff of a possibility that there was a nascent necromancer wandering around his aisles, well… It would not have gone well for me.

  The first night’s performance was, I think, a triumph if a Demon King’s triumphs are measured in screaming children being led out by the hand. Otherwise, the response was good. “Tone it down a little further,” said Curry, looking the happiest I’d yet seen him as he peeked through the curtains, “but not much. A bit more ‘delicious thrill,’ a bit less ‘bladder-emptying terror,’ Mr Cabal.” I was happy to oblige, as long as I was left to my own devices in the theatre cellar.

  (Cabal noticed Parkin looking at him speculatively over the top of his snifter. Cabal narrowed his eyes. “You’re imagining me in red tights, aren’t you?”

  Parkin shook his head, letting the reverie fly. “No, Cabal. Trying my damndest to avoid imagining it, if you must know.” After a moment he added, “Did you sing?” Cabal ignored him and continued.)

  I was confident that the Alhambra was haunted, but not by the usual chain-rattling suspects. There was a very distinct pattern here, a very ordered mind at work. Each death had been a neat 2300 days apart. That’s an ugly period measured in years – approximately six years and four months apart, a trifle over – but 2300 is a significant time span in arcane terms. Twenty-three time one hundred. No, there was magic here, of a perverse and corrupt kind and it was lending power to a ghost that, I suspected, liked to kill. But one cannot theorise without data.

  The theatre’s stage doorman gave the air of having been there as long as the place had stood, possibly longer; it was easy to imagine them building it around him. I discovered him in his tiny office hard by the stage door, little more than a booth really, with a window and counter that allowed him to watch the comings and goings. I bid him a good morning and he regarded me like a dragon from a Nordic saga, reptilian in aspect and surrounded by fumes from his briar pipe.

  “Good performance last night, sir,” he said, his gaze apparently focussed on a smudge on the glass between us. “You scared the little tykes shitless, bless ‘em.”

  “I try my best, Mr Pensey, and thank you, I value your opinion. You must have seen a good few productions here over the years. How long have you been here, now?”

  “Man and boy,” replied Pensey, not really answering the question. Changing tack, I noticed two shelves of books behind him on the rear wall, each dated. They seemed to be theatre records and I asked him about them. “Oh, yes,” he said, turning slowly to regard them. “My records, faithfully kept.” He turned slowly back to me. The action reminded me somehow of a dead man twisting on a rope. “Never missed a performance through sickness, nor accident, nor holiday.”

  “They must make fascinating reading,”

  That slow turn again. “They do. I spend long hours poring over them.” I imagined he did. It was far harder imagining him ever leaving that little office.

  “All that history.” I shook my head in admiration. “I wonder, Mr Pensey, might I look at one, perhaps?”

  He didn’t turn his chair to look at me this time, but just his head in a slow and baleful movement. I was sure I heard the noise of scales moving. “You… want to look at my records?”

  “Just out of interest.” I pointed to one volume in particular. “Perhaps that one? That’s the year of my birth. I wonder what was on the week I was born?”

  He still looked at me suspiciously, but I now saw it was actually jealousy. He obviously didn’t relish others thumbing through his annals, and who can blame him? Still, my open-faced interest seemed to sway him and he took down the book. “When were you born?” he asked, licking his thumb.

  I gave him a date that was not my birthday and he spent an interminable minute paging slowly through. “Ah,” he said. “That was a funny week.”

  “Oh?” I said, feigning innocent curiosity. “How so?”

  “We lost an act. Halfway through a season, too. Very inconvenient.”

  I gently pressed him until he told me the tale. It seemed that a stage magician calling himself Maleficarus the Magnificent had been retained at that time. He was, allowing for Pensey’s understatement, a remarkable proponent of stage illusions and close-up magic. “Went out to China and India,” said Pensey, “learning tricks from those fakirs and other heathens. Must have done him some good because I’ve seen dozens of magic acts, sir, and not one of them held a candle to Maleficarus. He spent a small fortune getting things just the way he liked them so it was a surprise to Mr Rumbelow, the manager back then, when one day Maleficarus doesn’t turn up for the matinee. His digs said all his stuff was there but nobody knew where he’d gone. The police even dragged the river. Not a sausage. It was a shame. We’d had people coming from two towns over to see him, had to make refunds to them all. Very sad.” Pensey looked off into the middle distan
ce, lost in memory. “Working this side of the orchestra pit can make a man very cynical. You see how the lady gets cut in half, how Peter Pan flies, you see all the joinery, wire and armatures that makes the magic work. But Maleficarus, he was boggling, sir. Never could guess how he did half the things he did, not even seeing them from the wings.” He brought himself back to the here and now, closing the book. “He did things that fair rattled the paradigms.”

  “Rattled the what?”

  “Paradigms, sir. Conceptual frameworks. From the Greek para meaning beside or beyond and deiknynai meaning to know. Will that be all, sir?”

  So, now I had the source of the haunt, I was sure. The date I’d given the worthy Pensey as my birthday was actually exactly two thousand and three hundred days before the first death. Theatricals vanish all the time, usually on the run from debt, and not a great deal is thought of it. I doubted that was the case here. Maleficarus had, if you recall, spent a ‘small fortune’ on bringing his act to the Alhambra’s stage so I doubted money was the problem. I also had my worries about any illusionist that decides to call himself maleficarus. It literally means ‘evil doer,’ but figuratively it is used to mean ‘witch’ or ‘warlock’ as in the title of Kramer and Sprenger’s endlessly amusing idiot’s guide to inquisition, the Malleus Maleficarum. There are mysteries to be found in the Orient that are not to be trifled with, and secrets that are protected by unforgiving and not always human guardians. I wondered if Maleficarus had roused something with his meddling, it had followed him here and dealt with him. And then, for some reason, stayed. More data still was required, much more data.

  I returned to my dressing room and considered my next move. I remember sitting at my dressing table and looking steadily at the mirror, my chin resting in my palm, perhaps expecting my reflection to have a bright idea. And as I ruminated, the door opened behind me.

  There was no drop in temperature, no feeling of unease, no warning at all and clearly, nor was there anybody on the other side of the door. I turned suddenly but the door stood open, the doorframe stood empty and there was nobody visible beyond. I rose slowly, walked quietly to the door and looked outside. There was nobody on the stair, nobody around the star trap mechanism, no sound, no signs. It was uncommonly quiet. Usually, there’d be somebody wandering around the stage over my head or the cleaners clattering around the auditorium or at the very least the skittering of the mice in the shadows. There was no sound at all. I doubted my senses and drew in a breath of air to test another. The basement usually had a musty smell, dust and rodents, but it smelled of nothing. I was aware of the coolness of the air upon my sinus and that was all. I touched my cheek and my face felt like cloth, a blurred, indistinct sensation. I knew, somehow knew, that my senses were being filtered through the perceptions of another. Something not quite dead, but a long way from alive. It was watching me, smelling me, tasting me and I was minded of a python that I had once watched leisurely get the measure of a rat before engulfing it and devouring it. Far from meekly lying around while I examined it, I had become the object of its scrutiny.

  As with demons, I have encountered two haunts in my life, Parkin, two ghosts. One was a pathetic creature, the fag end of a tragedy. I pitied it. But this one, this one caused my every hackle to rise. There was a slow, conniving malevolence about its presence that worried me, and an aching patience that worried me far more. What wonders could the humblest craftsman perform given a thousand years? And so what villainies could the palest malign spirit engineer when time is nothing to it? Suddenly I knew that Maleficarus had not accidentally brought some guardian here in his wake. He had brought something here deliberately and paid the price for his hubris. What plans it now had, I could not imagine. Whatever they were, though, I appeared to be part of them.

  The door to the prop store swung slowly open. I had little choice. Either it wanted to show me something or it wished me harm. Even the latter case would teach me something about it. I looked cautiously inside but the darkness was so complete that it was almost palpable. I tried the light switch but the ancient Bakelite clacked and rattled uselessly under my finger, its echo loud in the silence. I have had occasion to enter several tombs, but this place was quieter.

  I went back upstairs to Pensey’s office and borrowed a torch, a great practical thing sheathed in rubber that looked like it could double as a cosh. Its batteries were due for replacement, however, and the weak yellow light it produced did little to ease my misgivings as I entered the store. The prop store of any theatre makes fascinating viewing, but the catholic nature of provincial theatres make their stores all the more varied. In a few minutes I had passed Sweeney Todd’s rotting barber’s chair, a Chinese dragon, a plaster monolith and a stand of French windows. There were chests and boxes galore, rolled up knights’ pennants and a collapsing piano, Yorick’s skull in a goldfish bowl and the Duchess of Malfi’s lover dangling from a beam. All intriguing in their way, but none had the slightest relevance to what I was doing. I was on the point of leaving when I heard the door shut with a bang. I hardly had time to react before my torch was snuffed as easily as blowing out an unguarded candle. Abruptly, I was in the dark. Unfortunately, I was not alone.

  “Cabal,” whispered a voice in my ear. It was gentle and sibilant in the vowels. Human larynxes have difficulty doing that.

  “Good afternoon,” I replied. “You would be Maleficarus?”

  “Your path lies elsewhere, Cabal,” said the voice. I noticed that it had not answered the question. “Do not interfere.”

  “I seek only enlightenment.”

  “It is not here. Only death. Go now.”

  Perhaps it is a character flaw, but I hate being ordered around without even an introduction. “Why now?” I asked. “What is to happen?”

  But there was no reply this time. My torch flickered back into life and the door swung open. I was being dismissed. Now, this I know to be a character flaw but I refuse to accept warnings without being told the basis of the threat. If the phantom of the Alhambra wanted me to leave, it had chosen exactly the wrong way to go about it. I now knew that the next act in the haunt’s little scheme would be happening very soon and not waiting the usual lengthy pause. That suggested that it was reaching some sort of fruition and that meant that it was worth waiting to see, warning or no.

  This version of Mother Goose was a Demon King’s dream. After a hefty appearance early on to broker the deal and a shorter one a little later when the Dame asks for the goose back and gets turned down, the king enjoys a very hefty absence from the stage, more than long enough to run around to the pub next door and wash away the old hopes for a serious acting career, before making a slightly unsteady entrance for the grand finale. This was useful to me too, as it provided a period in which I could prowl the theatre backstage without running into too many people who had the leisure to ask me what I was doing. As I made my second exit from the stage that night, I made my way to Pensey’s office. He was characteristically delighted to see me. “Don’t get too rat-arsed and back in plenty of time for your cue, sir.”

  “I’m not leaving the building,” I said and enjoyed his mild surprise. “No, I was wondering about something you said about Maleficarus the Magnificent. You said he spent a small fortune preparing his act. What did you mean by that?”

  “Mr Maleficarus was a perfectionist, sir. He wasn’t happy with the facilities so he paid for improvements out of his own pocket.”

  “Sounds unusual.”

  “It’s unique, sir, at least in the history of the Alhambra. He was right, though, we certainly didn’t have anything like that trap.”

  “The star trap,” I said, knowing full well it must be.

  “Yes, sir. He had some of the best stage engineers in the country in to construct that. Wanted it to be perfect. Beautiful craftsmanship, always worked like a charm. At least until your predecessor got his head smashed into jam by it.” You will see that Pensey and tact were never likely to see eye to eye.

  “But he desig
ned it.”

  “Yes, sir.” He wrinkled his nose as if he thought I was playing some childish trick. “How did you know that?”

  “An educated guess.” I left Pensey and walked down the steps to the basement with as much dignity as one can muster in red tights, cloak and artificial moustache. Oh, and those damnable horns. The spirit gum it took to keep those in place, blast them.

  I examined the star trap closely. It was very clean, unsurprisingly. It must have had mechanics swarming over it immediately after the last “accident.” I had researched the previous three deaths and they had been far less spectacular. They had all involved deaths on stage, though, twice written into the death certificates as strokes, once as heart failure. All three, I noted, had suffered their collapse in the same quarter of the stage. I was prepared to make a small wager that each of them had walked across the closed star trap immediately before dying.

  The workings of the trap looked just as you’d imagine them; relatively simple but with excellent workmanship. I found the contacts that triggered the flash and smoke on stage as the platform passed a point, adjustable to allow for variations in the passenger’s height. That was no major discovery – I’d been measured up for the trap myself right from the first dress rehearsal although I’d never known how they used the information until then. I found the panniers where sandbags were placed to counteract the actor’s weight and launch him through the trap. I found the trigger mechanism, which ingeniously could be set off by the actor on the platform, a stagehand standing outside the frame of the platform lift or even from the wings using an electrical relay. All very clever, all very irrelevant. There had to be more to the trap than I was seeing, but I was damned if I could find it.

  I finally spotted Maleficarus’s little secret as I examined the collar of wood and metal that held the top of the frame rigid immediately below the trap itself. It seemed over-engineered to my eye and the closer I looked, the more redundant the collar appeared. A few seconds’ work with a screwdriver allowed me to remove the inner wooden hoop and exposed the metal band that lay sandwiched between it and another outer wooden hoop. It appeared to be brass, but I had my suspicions that it was a far rarer alloy. I could not find any weld or joining mark but there were imperfections; slight ridges that were just visible in the obtuse light of the electric torch and to the gentlest brushing of my fingertips. I went back to my dressing room and got some paper. I laid the paper around the inside of the hoop and gently shaded it with an eye pencil. Don’t look at me like that, Parkin. It’s perfectly normal theatrical accoutrement.