“Hero?” I shouted in his face. “Fucking hero?! Are you out of your tiny fucking mind?”
“Steady on now Don,” Connie said, looming suddenly at my side.
Wormwood waved him back and lit yet another cigarette.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “You were the best I could come up with in a pinch.”
“You do know what’s fucking down there, don’t you?”
“Not really,” he said, “and I don’t really care. I promised them a champion and they got you. I never promised them you’d be any bloody use.”
I coughed his smoke out of my face and sat back in the chair with a scowl. It was late afternoon and we were in his office off the downstairs bar. His secretary really hadn’t wanted to let me see him, but I had insisted.
“I want that hexring,” I said. “And the rest of it. Now, and for free.”
“Maybe I ain’t got it now,” he said.
“Maybe I’ll treat Trixie to a night out later,” I countered. “We could have a lovely time here. A few drinks, a nice little game of cards, send Wormwood screaming back to Hell, that sort of thing.”
“All right, all right, keep your fucking panties on,” he grumbled.
He unlocked the top drawer of his desk and took out a flat black case. He turned it around on the scrolled leather top of the desk and flipped it open to show me what was inside. The hexring lay on a bed of crimson velvet. It was a six-sided band of glistening black stone about the size of a fat wedding ring, inscribed all over with tiny swirling lines in patterns that seemed to move if you looked at them for too long.
“Get his other crap would you, Connie?”
Connie came back while I was still admiring the hexring. It really was rather beautiful, in a nausea-inducing sort of way. Connie was carrying a canvas bag that was wriggling slightly. A croak floated out of it.
“Toads,” he said proudly. “And, um. The other stuff.”
“Thanks, Con,” I said as I took it off him. I put the hexring back in its case and slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket. “Right, well. That’ll do for starters, but you still owe me, Wormwood. You owe me fucking big time for all this bollocks. And I want your direct line, too. I’m not too keen on your secretary, and she seems to hate me for some reason.”
“Can’t fucking think why,” Wormwood muttered, but he passed me a business card anyway.
I smiled when I saw it had his personal mobile number printed on it. He glowered and opened the Financial Times with a flourish.
“You done?” he asked. “I’m a busy man.”
I left him to it and hung around the closed bar while Connie called me a taxi back home.
Trixie was gone when I got in, hopefully off to commune with her Dominion somewhere. She had told me she needed peace and quiet for that, by which I knew she meant she didn’t want to be under the same roof as the Burned Man while she was doing it. I can’t say I really blamed her, all things considered. I had no idea where she had gone but for some reason I had a mad vision of her standing on the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, arms outstretched to the heavens and her flaming sword in her hand while a single sunbeam blazed down and made her hair shine like spun gold. The poetic effect was only slightly spoiled by me picturing her wearing that towel while she was doing it, but there you go. Can’t have everything can you?
I took the bag through to the workroom and dumped it on the floor, and showed the hexring to the Burned Man.
“This do you?” I asked it.
It nodded approvingly. “Perfect,” it said. “Now go sort those toads and get a little paintbrush, there’s a good lad.”
I gutted the toads in the kitchen sink and mixed their blood with the tincture of mercury while the Burned Man did whatever it was doing with the lodestone. Then it was just a matter of applying the blood and mercury mixture to the fine lines in the hexring while it sat atop the lodestone on the altar in front of the Burned Man. The hexring drank the mixture greedily, absorbing every drop until it was all gone. Not all magic has to be overly complicated if you’ve got the right bits and pieces. And an imprisoned archdemon to help you out, admittedly.
“That’ll do the trick,” the Burned Man said.
I phoned Charlie Page and told him I’d be over about nine.
After the last time, I had the sense to tell the taxi driver to wait for me. I didn’t expect this to take too long and I was buggered if I was getting the bus home again. Charlie opened the door wearing his usual combination of grey and beige, and looking as forlorn as ever. And poor. He still looked very poor too. I sighed.
“Thank you for coming back,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
“I said I would, didn’t I?” I said, as I followed him into his miserable little house.
“I’d have been in so much trouble if you hadn’t,” he said. Funny thing to say really, but I didn’t give it much thought at the time. “Have you got what you need?”
I patted my pocket with the hexring in it.
“Yeah,” I said.
“What are you going to do, if you don’t mind me asking?”
I took the ring out and showed it to him.
“This is what you might call a magic ring, for want of a better word for it,” I explained. “I just need to put it on her finger and she’ll be fine. No more throwing things and breaking stuff, no more screaming, not so long as she keeps the ring on. Then you can get her to a doctor like normal people do, all right?”
“That sounds… wonderful,” he said. He ushered me up the stairs ahead of him. “Go on up, you know the way. I’ve made sure she hasn’t got any bedpans to throw at you this time.”
I opened her bedroom door while Charlie was still climbing the stairs.
Six knives were hovering in the air over the bed.
Six long, wicked carving knives with gleaming sharp blades turned in the air as one to face me. Mrs Page screamed with hatred and they flew at me in a blizzard of steel.
I hurled myself backwards and crashed through the door behind me, the one into the front bedroom. Charlie’s bedroom. I hit the floor with a thump as three of the knives whizzed over my head and slammed into the wall. They stuck there quivering from the sheer force they had been thrown with. The others smashed straight through the front window and shot out into the dark street. I heard an engine start, and a squeal of tyres outside. There went my ride home then.
As I pulled myself up onto my knees I saw the altar under the window. The table was draped in a black cloth, with black candles on it and an inverted cross for the altarpiece. And on the walls, scrawled over and over again in Charlie Page’s spidery old man’s handwriting, filling every inch of space, two words repeated endlessly. Adam says. Adam says.
I spun round to find Charlie coming at me with another knife in his hand. This one was a sharp ritual dagger, the sort of thing I use. He didn’t look anything like as old and frail now, and he certainly didn’t look like he was crying any more.
“Adam says!” he screamed, as he plunged the knife down at me.
I rolled out of the way just in time, starting to panic. I know he was only a little old man but anyone’s dangerous with a knife in their hand, and one thing I’m not is a fighter. I never have been. Fights scare the shit out of me, to be perfectly honest about it. I don’t even know how to fight.
Charlie stumbled past me in his haste and I flailed at him with one outstretched hand. I managed to grab his ankle, more by luck than judgment, and yanked. I only half-tripped him but he lost his balance and slipped, and I snatched at the trailing hem of his cardigan and pulled him all the way down. He thumped onto the floor beside me and lost his grip on the dagger. He was quick as a snake though and he was on top of me before I knew what was happening, clawing at my face with an unnatural strength. His lips drew back from his yellow teeth in a grimace of hatred.
“Adam says!” he bellowed at me, spraying spittle in my face.
There was no way he should have been that strong. I could feel the magic in him, some spell driving him beyond his limits. No skinny old geezer had any right to be that strong and I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long, spell or no spell, but at this rate he was going to kill me before it wore off. I was going to have to do something drastic.
I got an elbow under his chin and shoved, wrestling with him in an unskilled, schoolboy sort of way until I managed to get hold of his hand. I pressed up on his scrawny throat with my forearm to keep him from biting me and fumbled in my pocket with my free hand until I found what I needed. He was still hissing and spitting when I rammed the hexring onto his finger. All the magical strength went out of him at once as the hexring did its work. He sagged limply on top of me, gasping.
I punched him in the face as hard as I could. I know, I know, he was a poor little old man and all that, but for fucksake!
He flopped over onto his back on the floor, unconscious. I sat up with a wince, cradling my hand against my stomach. Fuck, that had hurt. I left him there and went back into Mrs Page’s room. I was careful, but I didn’t think she’d be dangerous any more.
I was right. She was quite dead, poor old love, and looked like she had been for a good long while. I touched her cheek and found she was ice cold. I sighed.
What did that evil old bastard do to you, sweetheart?
I gently took one of the pillows from under her head and laid her down, closing her eyes with my fingertips. I carried the pillow back into the front room where Charlie was still out cold, and stood looking down at him for a moment.
Then I knelt down beside him and pressed the pillow firmly over his face.
No, I’m not in the business of bumping off sweet little old ladies, but murderous devil-worshipers? Yeah, those I’ll kill. I held the pillow down until I was sure he had stopped breathing, then took the hexring off him and slipped it back into my pocket. That might come in handy again another time.
I let myself out.