I switched on the overhead light. Then I went over to the bed and prodded at the covers with the broken bedside lamp. In the end, I gathered up enough courage to lift the blankets and turn them over. There was nothing there. If it hadn’t been a terrifying illusion, then it had left us.
Madeleine came up behind me and touched my back. “I don’t think I could sleep any more,” she told me. “Not in that bed. Why don’t we start out for London?”
I found my wristwatch where it had been knocked on the floor. It was five-thirty in the morning. It would soon be dawn.
“All right,” I said, feeling very little better than I had when we first went to bed. “It looks like Elmek’s pushing us on, in any case. Remind me to remember that devils rarely sleep.”
Madeleine put on her blue jeans without panties, and combed out her hair in front of the dingy mirror. I said, “I can’t take much more of this. I don’t even know why it does these things.”
“Maybe it’s boasting,” suggested Madeleine. “They’re supposed to be vain creatures, aren’t they, devils:”
“It could be that. If you ask me, it’s just relishing how frightened we are. It intends to squeeze the last ounce of fear and agony out of us two and get its goddamned money’s worth.”
Madeleine tugged a grey ribbed sweater over her head. It was so cold in that bedroom I could see the outline of her nipples through the thick Shetland wool. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have the feeling it’s excited, as if it’s getting itself all worked up to join its brethren. All that boasting about what devils had done in the past. And that figure, whatever it was, with all those squids and snakes and things. That was like some horrible kind of showing-off.”
I brushed my hair, and did my best to shave with a blunt razor and no soap. There were dark smudges of tiredness under my eyes, and I looked about as healthy as a can of week-old tuna. In fact, I was so exhausted that I could hardly feel frightened any more. When we were ready, we tiptoed out on to the landing, and went downstairs through the dark, creaking house. There was no one around, so I left three pounds on the hall table, and we let ourselves out into the freezing early morning.
The sun came up over the Sussex Downs just as we were driving out of Brighton. On each side of us, the long frosted hills stretched into the haze; to Chanctonbury Ring in the west, and to Ditchling Beacon in the east. At that time of the morning, in winter, Sussex has a strangely prehistoric feel to it, and you become uncannily sensitive to the memory that Ancient Britons trod these downs, and Roman legions, and suspect that across the smokey plain of the Sussex Weald, the fires of Anglo-Saxon ironfounders could be seen glimmering in the depths of the forests. Beside me, Madeleine sat huddled in her coat, trying to doze as we turned northwards towards London.
We drove along roads white with ice, past old cottages and pubs and filling stations and roadside shops advertising home-made fudge and large red potatoes. Behind us, in the back of the car, the copper-and-lead box was silent as a tomb. The sun rose on my right, and flickered behind the spare trees as I sped on to the motorway. In another hour, we would reach the suburbs of London. By noon, we would probably discover whether Elmek was going to keep his bargain or not. I thought of the saying that he who sups with devils must needs use a long spoon, and it didn’t encourage me very much.
As we left the fields and the countryside behind, and came into the crowded grey streets of Croydon and Streatham, the sky grew ominously dark, and I had to drive with my headlamps on. On the wet sidewalks, shoppers and passers-by hurried with coat-collars turned up against the cold, and a few first flakes of snow settled on my windshield. The traffic was crowded and confused, and it took another hour of edging my way between red double-decker buses and black shiny taxis before I crossed the Thames over Chelsea Bridge, and made my way towards the Cromwell Road. The snow was falling heavily now, but it melted as soon as it touched the busy streets and pavements. I passed Sloane Square, with its fountains and bedraggled pigeons; turned left at Knights-bridge, and then juddered along in solid traffic past Harrods and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Today, London looked grimly Dickensian and as we drove by the Natural History Museum, with its twisted Gothic pillars and its gardens arranged with petrified trees, I felt as if bringing this medieval devil into the city was part of some dark and sinister Victorian plot. Only my tiredness and my fear reminded me that what was inside that locked trunk was hideously real, and that this morning in December in London was overshadowed with the vicious horror of mankind’s most ancient enemies. I lit up a cigarette, and coughed.
At last, we arrived outside 18 Huntington Place. It was a late-Victorian house of grimy yellow-and-grey bricks, in that gloomy hinterland between Cromwell Road and High Street Kensington, all shared flats and registry offices and unfashionable mews. I pulled the car into the curb, and nudged Madeleine awake. She blinked, and stretched, and said, “Are we here already? That was the best sleep I’ve had in days.”
There was no sign on the black spiked railings outside the house to show that it still belonged to the Ministry of Defence. But I climbed stiffly out of the car, and walked up to the front door to see if there was any kind of identification by the two rows of doorbells. There was nothing at all, not even the name of a tenant. The door itself was firmly locked, and by the condition of its cracked grey paint, looked as if it hadn’t been decorated for twenty years. I tried to peer through a dirty pane of spiderweb glass beside it, but inside the house it was completely dark.
Madeleine came across the sidewalk. “Any luck?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. It looks as if it’s empty. Maybe they just shut the devils up here and left it.”
“But that was thirty years ago.”
I shrugged. “We could always ring the bell and see.”
I looked back towards the Citröen, parked against the curb in the softly-falling snow. “We have to get in here somehow,” I told her. “Otherwise it’s going to be cold cuts for lunch.”
“Maybe the next-door neighbours know something,” she suggested. “Even if the house is empty, it must belong to somebody. If we could only get ourselves a key, and take a look round. We could always pretend we wanted to buy it.”
I stepped back and looked up at the second and third floors of the house, blinking against the snow that fell in my upturned face. “I can’t see any lights. I guess it must be empty.”
I went back up to the porch and pushed all the bells. I could hear some of them ringing in different parts of the house. Then I waited for a while, shuffling my feet to bring the circulation back to my toes. Madeleine looked at me tiredly, and I knew that both of us were pretty close to the end of our tether. A taxi drove by, blowing its horn.
We were just about to turn away when we heard a noise inside the house. I raised my eyes in surprise. Then there were sharp footsteps coming along the corridor, the rattle of security chains, and the door opened. A lean young man in a black jacket and grey business pants stood there, with a haughty and enquiring expression on his face.
“Did you want something?” he asked, in that clipped voice that immediately told you he’d been given a superior education and probably read Horse and Hound.
I gave him an uneasy kind of a smile. “I’m not sure,” I told him. “Does this building still belong to the War Office?”
“You mean the Ministry of Defence.”
“That’s right. I mean the Ministry of Defence.”
The young man looked sour. “Well, that depends who you are and why you wish to know.”
“Then it does?”
The young man looked even sourer.