Once...

  Thom thought he might be wrong, it might just have been the effect of the shifting light as iridescent colours swept around the room and candle flames wavered in their breeze, but he thought the old man’s lipless mouth had formed a smile – a frail one, but still a smile – and that there was the faintest look of recognition in his watery yet oddly luminous eyes. A piercing shriek drew his attention to a corner on the other side of the bed.

  Hugo was on his feet, his body covered with slithering snakes. They were smaller than before, but looked just as deadly. Arms that seemed to beseech Thom wore bracelets of writhing serpents. These creatures were dark green, almost black, in tone, and they bore little resemblance to the small grass snakes Hugo had feared so much as a child and ever since. They slid across Hugo’s chest, around his waist, finding their way into his clothes so that moving shapes bulged beneath the cloth.

  Hugo shrieked again as a snake stole across his face, over his mouth, muting the cry. His eyes looked as though they might pop from his head. He tore at the snake on his face with his serpent-laden hands in an effort to rip it away, stumbling back into the corner as he did so, only the walls preventing him from falling. The snake nipped at his fleshy fingers, then bit down hard with venomous fangs, hanging on when Hugo desperately tried to flick it away. He shrieked again, and again, and again.

  ‘Help me!’ he managed to plead in between the shrieks.

  But his whole body was now a dense but unstable knot of glistening serpents. They coiled around his neck, drawing themselves tight, forming a noose that smoothly squeezed his throat.

  Thom had no idea what to do, how to help him. The commotion continued around him – the hundreds of shooting stars and their unearthly chants, the moaning of the withering shadows, for the darkness itself had voice – and he saw Jennet with the elf against the wall by the door, their eyes wide, Rigwit quaking. More and more winged lights flew from the open book on the floor, funnelling out to join the fray, their brightness fierce, but not yet overwhelming the umbra. In fact, although pierced by the zooming lights, the shadows seemed to remain as thick and looming as before.

  Jennet caught his eye. Even from that distance and with all that was going on in between, something passed between them, an emotion that excluded all else in that fearsome room. In Jennet’s expression there was much anxiety, fright also – as Thom felt sure there was in his own – but even in such circumstances, there was tenderness too and it was for him alone.

  He pointed at Hugo and she understood.

  Jennet called to the swooping faeries using their language, their voice, and many came together before her, swarming like electric bees. It was her turn to point at the serpent-bound figure in the corner and a whole squadron of tiny and not so tiny sprites swept from the main body to the far corner of the room. They made a slight diversion on the way though, swerving around the pentagram chalked out on the boarded floor where Nell stood transfixed. Their glittering jetstream trailed across the room behind them and none of its floating motes settled within the boundary of the symbol’s circle either.

  The faeries hovered over Hugo and his living bonds and scattered and blew their dust. The snakes reared their heads and bared dripping fangs, many of them uncoiling to drop to the floor in a languid heap, some of these slithering into the cavernous gloom beneath the bed, while others headed towards the crashing terrace door. Those still clinging to Hugo began to shrivel, their scaly skin wrinkling, became brittle so that bits flaked away. Hugo appeared incapable of fending for himself: he swooned in the corner, his face pale and drawn even in the warm light from the candles and faeries alike, his eyes glazed as they stared directly ahead. He seemed to have retreated into his own world, a place where nothing could touch him, even though the nightmare of serpents was from deep within his own mind; perhaps he had locked himself away in the place beyond both consciousness and subconsciousness (perhaps even between them), a hideaway where nothing – no inner conflict, nor outside influence, and certainly no physical threat – could ever enter.

  An incredible rage of thunder erupted from above, the lightning itself strobing for several long seconds. Thom was sure the roof had been struck and so fierce was the impact that he automatically shielded his grandfather’s skin-and-bones body with his own. The ceiling held, although dust drifted down to mingle with the twinkling particles strewn by the little people. There was a series of sharp cracks over the thunder’s roar and he looked up in time to see several of the plate-glass windows crack from top to bottom.

  As the last of the snakes dropped from Hugo’s immobile body, the faeries resumed their attack on the darkness, because strange forms could be observed moving inside its inkiness, a brief and non-defining outline here, the warped curve of some impenetrable creature there – for the battle was far from won. Although weaker, the darkness prevailed, the quick-darting lights mere shooting stars in a black universe.

  The wind howled through the roof terrace’s restless door so that candle-flames danced at an angle. Even the flying mites, with their lustrous but fragile wings, were buffeted, the dust they scattered, blown across the great bedchamber in eddies and swirls. As Thom’s hair was tugged, his shirt snagged, he saw that the wind had caught Nell’s long black hair, tossing it around her head and shoulders, flapping the piece of paper he’d noticed in her hand on entering the room, whipping at the long loose skirt she wore so that it twisted and snapped in its currents. He also observed (it had been hidden before) that in her other hand she clutched a black dagger, an athame. It was now clutched to her breast, above which hung an ankh, a strange cross with looped upper arms held there by a silver chain around her neck.

  She was rigid, still trance-like, even though the wind flayed hair and clothes. Her eyes were closed.

  Despite all that was happening and despite his terror, Thom still had time to note how stunningly beautiful she was in the shadowy and perhaps muting candlelight (for some reason, reflections from the faeries did not touch her), more beautiful than he had first realized. She stood as a silent siren in her rough chalk pentagram, exotically and erotically alluring – but deadly. He blinked as if to break a spell cast between them.

  And as he did so, her eyes opened. They were confused, switching this way and that, finally coming to rest on him and the invalid he held in his arms. Her face changed. It became ugly in its loathing. Her crimson lips corrupted to a sneer, her black eyes blazed with a passion whose genesis was hate. The hand bearing the dagger moved away from her breasts. Towards Thom.

  He readied himself. He gently lowered his grandfather on to the bed and, remaining half-sitting, turned back to Nell and her vicious gaze. The potion he had drunk in the stairway appeared to have worn off, for he was close to exhaustion once more. Maybe it was the terrible dread in his heart that had had time to wear down the magic, or maybe it was because continual horror inevitably debilitated the soul itself. Whatever the answer, and whatever his condition, he was not going to give in to this monster. She would have to kill him first to get to his grandfather. As she had tried to kill him once before by causing his stroke with her magic witchcraft.

  But that was the moment when something else happened. Something extraordinary.

  THEY CAME from the darkness. And they came as if to claim her. For their ragged nebulous arms reached out to her alone.

  At first, Nell was not aware. Her eyes still burned with black-hearted hatred, and her gaze was still fixed on Thom. But she frowned when Thom was distracted by something behind her and because of the undoubted fright in his expression, she knew it was no trick. And then, she stiffened.

  The hate left her lovely yet dangerous eyes, to be replaced by alarm. She spun around. She cried out.

  They were formed from all the things that had hidden in the murk, grossly misshapen entities that amalgamated to create more substantial configurations, a gathering that had found form through Nell Quick’s own incautious and misguided practice of the Black Arts. Through her vain callings. Through her recklessne
ss.

  And they had risen from the depths to discover shape and substance in vengeful caricatures of ancient witches.

  These were the true hellhagges.

  These were the sorceresses of old writings, destroyers and malefactors all, furies each and everyone. Never themselves of human breed, they could only exist in human dreams and legends, reviled by the worthy, revered by the wicked.

  They were Nell Quick’s evil externalized, beckoned from places adjacent to Hell, idolizers of everything sinful, everything cruel, everything perverted.

  Followers of the Dark Lord himself.

  They edged apart, a shambling movement, the gait of the very old and crooked, for they were aged and bent, their crone faces, which were only half-concealed by great hoods like the monk-figures before them, rutted and wizened, their sored withered skin grey and unappealing. The more they shuffled forward, the more plain in image they became, ancient hags of diabolism, whose scabby countenances somehow told of eternal misery and depravity. Although their figures were not solid – they were amorphous, subtly shifting in pose and the blackness that had birthed them sometimes imposed itself through their garb – they seemed as real as any person in the room, and their stink was far worse than the chamber’s general malodour, which even the furious wind was unable to dispel.

  Nell cringed before them, even though they were what she aspired to be. These grim creatures were both her superior and her goal. But she had not yet understood that corruption of the soul would always lead to the eventual degeneration of the flesh.

  Their wicked eyes gleamed as their semicircle around Nell drew close.

  She looked about her wildly. This was not right, not how it should be! Why did she feel threatened by them? Why did they look at her that way? Why did they grin, why did they mock? She did not want those scaly and leprous hands to touch her, did not want to be drawn into them! She threw the black dagger, and they absorbed its metal. She screamed and they chuckled and drew ever nearer.

  Nell’s back was turned to him, so Thom could not see her face. But he could imagine the horror there. She was retreating from the creeping hags and soon her legs were against the end of the bed. She still clutched the piece of paper that he suddenly guessed was his grandfather’s last Will and Testament, presumably handwritten by Hartgrove from Sir Russell’s dictation, and he briefly wondered if she had brought it here to gloat in front of the dying invalid. Her other hand was stretched out before her to ward off the advancing coven and for a moment – it was a very short moment – he almost felt sorry for her. This was her nightmare come into being and she could not control it, just as she could not control anything that had gone before on this hideous night. She had only meant literally to frighten Sir Russell to death, to cause another heart seizure that would be his last. It seemed that she was about to pay the price for her folly, her vanity in thinking that not only could she summon such unearthly creatures, but that she could command them also. But of course all she had invoked was the personal nightmare of each individual in the room, including her own.

  For as the taunting hags crowded her, pulling at her clothes, lifting her skirt, pinching her flesh, they let the cowls fall away to their crooked shoulders, revealing countenances that were even more unfavourable than already imagined when mostly hidden from view. The skin of their scalps, from which hung scant wisps of white hair, was covered in crusting scabs and sores, their wrinkled faces full of lesions and wounds that oozed yellow pus. Their grey eyes had no lids, condemned always to see, even in sleep. Some had but a single eye, an empty, livid, red-puckered socket evidence that the other eyeball had once been torn free; some had noses that had been eaten away as if by disease, only fragments of bone and gristle remaining. Grinning and lipless mouths were mainly toothless, merely black holes that gabbled ceaselessly in some unknown language.

  They seemed pleased to see Nell (or perhaps they were just glad to be free of their own hell for a while), for they cackled gleefully as they prodded her with thin ulcerated hands, their fingernails long and curved like talons.

  Their indications were evident, for between pokes and prods, they pointed at themselves, and Thom – as did Nell, herself – began to understand their garbled message.

  This, in her vanity, in her blind ambition, in her wickedness, was what she was to become. Eventually, her abuse of the wiccan craft in unleashing forces that were beyond her skills and her right would lead her to the corruption of her own physical body, the inside mirrored by the outside, the price of pursuance of the occult and the powers she sought. The price that they, themselves, had paid in other lives.

  Nell’s terrified but nimble brain grasped the significance of these embittered creatures that were more than mere apparitions and she started to scream. And scream. And scream . . .

  But there was far worse to come.

  Just as the hellhagges were about to overwhelm Nell with their jabbing and goading, their slaps and their pinches, lightning whitened the room and thunder shook the walls and ceiling. Every window on the west side of the room suddenly shattered inwards, millions of scintillating fragments and shards spewing into the room, an explosion of glass that blew Hugo to his knees and caused the others -even the witches – to cower. The wind roared through the new openings.

  Thom threw himself over his grandfather’s prone body again, and felt the bed beneath them vibrate.

  Everything was bleached. Even the lights emanating from the faeries were subjected to the greater fulguration, for it had gained entry into the rooftop room itself and it was constant for a few seconds, an intense, dazzling flood of brightness that froze everyone present into colourless sculptures. The airborne faeries became still, many of them dropping to the floor like chemically-sprayed insects. The thunder continued to reverberate and Thom clapped his hands to his ears to muffle the sound.

  And even as the light flickered away and the thunder’s roar diminished, the coven of hellhagges turned away from Nell Quick to look as one towards the open terrace door, for they had sensed the presence even before it had revealed itself.

  The wind suddenly dropped, although the darkness itself continued to swirl like a dense mist. No longer dominated by the other light, the brilliance of the faeries nevertheless dimmed, became soft, insubstantial. The flames of the many candles also dulled, the glow becoming weak, ineffectual. Shiny glass littering the floor became lustreless.

  It was Jennet who screamed, a spare sound, but one of absolute despair.

  And the faeries began wailing, a feeble cacophony of dread.

  The old crones, all in disordered shape but dark in robe and aura, raised their gnarled hands to their disfigured faces, shielding their lidless eyes from the being that filled the doorway across the room. Some turned away and howled and whimpered, while others beseeched the new interloper, hands reaching out towards it, then snatched back as if burnt, short shrieks coming from the crones’s toothless mouths.

  Nell, her body half-crouched, wary of her tormentors, slowly turned her head towards the door.

  Thom followed her gaze.

  As yet it had no formal arrangement. It was pale in the darkness that flowed around and into it, merely snatches of form that suggested, but only suggested, a figure. It was of average height – unless the parts that were suggested rather than made visible were required to knit together to make the whole – and appeared, so far, to have human form; that is, suggested eventual human form, for it was too scattered and too ill defined at that moment to tell. And of all the noxious smells wafting around the room, this was the most foul, for it clogged the nostrils and caused the throat to constrict. It was a stench not of this realm.

  The hellhagges stepped back from their intended victim, leaving Nell standing alone in the inverted star-shape. They set up a low moaning as they shrank before the visitor, leaning away with cruel-nailed hands raised in dramatic gesture. The faeries, their beacons no longer bright, gathered against the far wall, close to Jennet and Rigwit, who clutched at each othe
r (the elf held aloft in Jennet’s arms). Darkness seemed to pulse around the mutable vision as it entered the room, gliding rather than walking.

  It moved towards Nell Quick, pale and spectral parts of a whole that might resemble human form when assembled – no, not assembled, for the proportions now seemed correct; it was just that the swirling darkness interfered with the overall shape, concealing elements so that those visible appeared adrift – and the closer it drew, so the fluid bulk that was the coven backed away. Thom could see their shapes in the gloaming, unsightly visages that would forever haunt him, long, claw-nailed hands waving in the air above the mass, and he could hear the reverential terror in their howls and moans. He sensed a kind of fear-struck awe in them.

  The as yet unformed entity stopped before Nell, the darkness around it like a ruffled cloak caught by the wind. And indeed, the wind had returned so that the tiny flames around the room sputtered and leaned, the shadows ever-moving, the smells whisked away but others taking their place.

  Thom could see Nell’s profile and strangely her face was in rapture. There was a luminous shining in her dark eyes as she regarded the blurred vision that remained unmoving in front of her. Her breasts heaved and her breath came in short, sharp gasps; perspiration beaded her brow and trickled down her cheeks like tears. Her teeth were bared, her scarlet lips drawn back from them; her body trembled. To Thom, it looked as if she were in some kind of paroxysm – or even an orgasmic trance.

  But the unclear figure finally began to take on a more stable and defined form. Features drifted through. A limb, thin, white, blurred at its edges. The chest, again thin, scarcely muscled, but a man’s chest. That is, it resembled a man’s chest, for this thing could not possibly be human. The stomach and waist became more solid, for they had already been present as a variable lightness in the dusky mists. The rest emerged – or semi-emerged; they were not yet complete, nor binding, their arrangement remained insecure and vignetted – together, the naked legs, the rest of the second arm, the genitalia – a man’s genitalia that conformed to any other man’s, neither overdeveloped, nor undersized, merely an ordinary penis over an ordinary scrotum – except there was no pubic hair. The feet, the shoulders, the hands were all vague and ambiguous, shimmering softly.