For all that, Jyp didn’t goad him more than was absolutely necessary. I was glad, for a good many reasons. We herded the man, still protesting, round to the far corner of the warehouse, to where a great stack of misshapen bales stood in three rough layers against the wall. The odour of them was indescribable – not bad, exactly, just indescribable, except that some of it was dry earth, and the rest suggested medicine rather than food, and resin rather than spice. Like menthol, it seemed to numb some senses and heighten others; and it was very penetrating. As the lantern caught the shapes I saw they were enormous square-sided bundles of crude straw netting, through whose wide meshes dirty pinkish things, gnarled and knobby, stuck out in obscene-looking attitudes.
Frederick motioned Cuffee that way. ‘Open the bales!’ he ordered his neighbour. ‘Each one now, one by one!’
Cuffee held back, glaring around at us, sweating hard. I saw now he was by no means old, and he had a weightlifter’s muscles beneath his dirty t-shirt – from hauling furniture, no doubt; but his great quaggy belly put ten years on him, and fear seamed his face. He mouthed an obscenity at us all, and visibly faltered before seizing the first bale on the top row. He dug his fingers into the tough netting and effortlessly ripped it apart, then skipped sharply back. Roots exploded everywhere, tumbling down around our ankles; the heady smell billowed up about us, but there was nothing else there. ‘Carefully, damn you!’ growled Jyp. ‘Don’t go damaging Frederick’s stock!’
Shaking his head and cursing frantically, Cuffee tore open the next bale more carefully, but still skipped back and let the contents flow down; and for all Jyp’s curses and Frederick’s puffing he did just the same with the next one, and the seven or so after that. A sloping heap of roots grew and slumped out across the floor. I leaned heavily on the trident; I was already giddy with the shock of things, and the heavy fumes seemed to make it worse. But beyond a few mouldy-looking duds, Cuffee turned up nothing at all out of place. We all watched him. He was scared, all right; so scared that when he came to the beginning of the bottom row, he baulked again. Jyp wasted no word, but simply jabbed his swordpoint against Cuffee’s kidneys. The man yelped and jumped, unseamed the first bale right down the front, then as it slowly spilled its contents he flung himself away so fast he skidded on the hard round roots and crashed to the ground.
But beyond the rustling trickle of roots there was nothing – nothing at all. In idiotic puzzlement Cuffee stared at the little low heap that was left in the sagging net. He began to giggle hysterically with the reaction, and I felt like joining him. Then he reached out a tentative finger, and poked it.
Something pounced back at him. In all my life I’d never seen anything like it.
It was a hand, a huge one; but that makes it sound too human. Transparent, half-formed, fluid, it shone mistily from within, shimmering the colour of distant lightning through the dimness. It clutched at that probing finger and clenched shut. There was a crackle, a shriek, a puff of smoke – and a glare lanced down Cuffee’s arm, a brightness so intense I saw all the bones shine right through the flesh as if it was smoky glass. Light flared out between the roots as if a furnace blazed there; then before we could even blink the last of the bale burst outward. A blinding corona enfolded the hapless Cuffee like an anemone snaring a fish.
‘Dupiah!’ shrieked Frederick, in a voice that shivered the air. And, clapping both hands to his bald head he bolted, still shrieking, for the door.
‘Dupiah!’ Mall echoed him. Jyp dropped the lantern with a crash. As one, before I could move, they seized hold of my arms and flung themselves after him, dragging me along bodily between them, still facing backward. Out of the shadows came the deep boom of the door as Frederick reached it. Staring helplessly as my heels skipped over the boards, I saw the glaring glow rise and come after us, shifting and changing as it moved. It was a view I could have done without. I seemed to see all sorts of things in that ghastly orb of swirling smoke and light, eerie, horrible things that set my teeth on edge. I shook with a sense of sheer immanent malice I would never have believed; devouring hatred poured out of it like an acrid stream. Just one jump ahead of it, it seemed, we raced around the corner, and reached the door.
It was shut.
In his panic the old man had slammed it behind him. Jyp and Mall dropped me like a sack and threw themselves at it. I scrambled up, half hypnotized by that glowing, seething thing bearing down on us. It was sheer loathing and revulsion, nothing like bravery, that drove me to dash back and swing out at the thing with the trident I still held.
The shaft slowed suddenly, as if the air had thickened and grown glutinous; it jarred, stopped, stuck. Then the ghastly light danced upon the three tines, and came racing and sizzling down the shaft towards my hands. I dropped the thing with a yell, barely in time, as the door creaked open. The others seized me, flung me bodily out to crash across the cobbles, and themselves after me. Jyp pulled the door closed behind him with a crash, and Mall threw her weight against the handle while he fumbled with the keys. I sat up, dizzy and sick; my arm was agony again, I had struck my head badly on the cobbles, and acquired a whole new set of bruises. I watched Jyp trace a strange symbol with his swordtip in the thick paint of the door, a weird curlicued shape like a series of interlocking arcs ringing a compass rose. Then he reversed his sword and thrust it through the twin handles like a symbolic bar.
That done, he sank to his knees with a gasping sigh. ‘Damn!’ he muttered, in a shaken voice quite unlike his normal confident tones. ‘What a goddam crock! We’ll have to get old Le Stryge to this!’
‘Aye, well enough,’ said Mall, hitching up her tight pants. ‘But what of –’ And she jerked a thumb at me.
I swallowed. Words wouldn’t come, sensible words. ‘What … what was that bloody thing?’ was the best I managed.
‘Nothing!’ barked Jyp, so savagely I hardly knew him. Anger burned off any sign of his normal friendly self. He sounded almost contemptuous. ‘Nothing for you to meddle with! Nothing for an outsider!’
With astonishing strength and urgency he seized my arms, lifted me bodily and slammed me on my feet as if I was a child. Then he more or less frogmarched me out into the murky road and up to where my car stood, its doors still wide, the courtesy lights glowing yellow into the haze.
‘Now go!’ he barked, and thrust me roughly into the driving seat. ‘Get lost! Beat it, y’hear! Come back in a week, maybe – no, a month, if you must! Better still, forget what you’ve seen – forget me – all of us – everything! Drive off in your fancy closed car – close your mind! Forget!’ And with that he slammed the door violently shut.
Unable to speak, I stared beyond him. Mall was barely visible, a pale face watching beneath the dim warehouse light. She stepped back, and blended with the dark. Jyp spun on his heel and went off down the cobbles at a fast trot, without a backward glance, till he too was one with the night.
Slowly, shakily, I started the engine, slipped into gear and turned the car out and away. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to drive, at first. But the way back seemed shorter somehow, the streets I knew eager to reclaim me. I turned out of Danube Street into the bright lights and hubbub of a cheerful city evening. But I couldn’t feel at ease there, not for now; I’d looked into the heart of another light, and it writhed still inside me. Something had been scorched out of me, new fires set alight. It occurred to me then, with a slight twinge of surprise, that I’d never been what you might call sensitive to other people, adept at reading their feelings, not normally. But something had given me that gift, however briefly. I’d read Jyp like a book. And so I wasn’t as bewildered as I might have been, nor any way offended by his sudden harshness. The man was terrified. It was as simple as that. Strange and formidable as this creature who’d befriended me seemed to be, he was almost out of his mind with fear. It was for my own good he’d tried to drive me away.