better can't cope with too much reason and get desperate
to believe in something else, anything you can't prove.
What's changed, eh? You'd think humanity couldn't live
without magic. Back then it was everywhere a lot of people
looked. You couldn't walk down your garden without
tripping over a fairy, and even Conan Doyle ended up
thinking they were real. Pity he didn't have Sherlock
Holmes to sort him out, because he got taken in by the
spiritualists after his wife died. Freud ought to have gone
into why their victims needed to see lots of white stuff
coming out of someone . . .
This startled a laugh out of Ellen, one that felt guilty and surreptitious. She'd begun to dislike the tone of the site so much that she might almost have been sharing someone else's resentment. She propped her chin on her fist, at least one of which yielded more than she appreciated, and scrolled down.
Doyle was just the best-known writer to get into the
occult. William Butler Yeats, horror writers like Stoker and
Machen and Blackwood, Sax Rohmer that thought up Fu
Manchu – they all joined the Order of the Golden Dawn,
Victorian England's cult sensation. So did the Astronomer
Royal (just the Scots one) and the President of the Royal
Academy (no Scot him) and Oscar Wilde's wife (bugger her).
The Order didn't order Baldy Crowley, but he was the
magician that got all the publicity, and maybe he gave away
what it was all about deep down. One thing was having
magical duels. Baldy challenged the founder to one, and a
couple of magic men who'd gone up north had a real old
witchy rumpus. Step forward Arthur Pendemon, who
sounds like he fancied himself as some sort of demonic
economist, and Peter Grace . . .
Ellen pushed herself to her feet and leaned forwards to drag up the sash of the window. Perhaps the cloying smell that reminded her of digging in the earth was outside the building, because her action seemed not to affect it. Of course, someone must be gardening. As the girl on the balcony raised a slim arm to acknowledge her, Ellen retreated behind her desk. She passed a hand over her moist forehead and wiped it on her old baggy trousers before closing her fingers over the mouse.
The story goes Pendemon thought Grace was calling up too
many spirits and devils and the rest of that lot when he
wanted to use them himself. Seems like even demons get tired
and want a night off now and then. You'd think these two
masters of the occult might have learned to share and be
good little boys, but Grace told Pendemon if he wanted any of
the powers Grace was supposed to have made slaves out of he
could fight him for them. He must have thought his were
bigger and nastier, but Pendemon had a trick under his pointy
hat if it wasn't up his robe. 'All flesh incubates the dark,' he's
meant to have said, and 'At the core of every soul horror waits
to gnaw forth' and 'The mass of men are vessels of dread for
the thaumaturge to draw upon.' In English that means he
thought he could use anybody handy to send Grace something
as horrible as horrible gets. Anyone who wandered near
Pendemon's house . . .
What use was this to Ellen's book? She let go of the glistening plastic lump and raised her ponderous hand to dab her infirm forehead. She was lowering her hand to wipe it when it faltered in front of her nose, that pallid excrescence that appeared to have split in half to trouble both inner edges of her vision. With a good deal of reluctance she brought the hand closer. Was it the source of the underlying smell? She wasn't sure, though her hand was certainly as moist as an imperfectly squeezed sponge. She let the flabby appendage flop on the desk, only to wonder which she found less appealing – the hand or the prospect of reading the rest of the text. Couldn't she look at Pendemon's house instead? Even that would involve wielding her fat etiolated sweaty hand. It and the insidious smell, which she was increasingly unable to believe had any source besides her own dank self, had begun to sicken her. She was staring at the hand as if this might render it no longer part of her, except that the rest was at least as bad, when her mobile wriggled against her padded hip before emitting its protracted note.
She saw her hand jerk nervously, and tried not to think that she saw it wobble like a jellyfish stranded on the beach of the desk. She fumbled the mobile out of her pocket and poked a key with a blundering thumb as she lifted her hand almost close enough to touch her pulpy cheek. 'Ellen?' Hugh said.
'I'm afraid so.' She hoped he hadn't caught that – she didn't want to have to explain – and so she added 'Are you checking up on me?'
'Why, do I need to? What's wrong?'
'I meant are you checking to see if I've found out anything about the person you mentioned who used to live where we were talking about.'
What had happened to her language? She was sidling around the subject without understanding why. As she gazed at the screen she was close to fancying that the information below the edge was about to inch into view – that it was determined not to stay buried. Hugh didn't help by mumbling 'Have you?'
Ellen had the odd impression that he would prefer not to know, unless he hoped for a negative answer. A faint tremor rose through the lines on the monitor, as if the text were about to take on more life. As she reached to quell it with a fat hand at the end of an arm that was surely not as plump, she was suddenly afraid that her pudgy clutch would dislodge the lurking words from their den. She closed her eyes while she admitted 'I'm just starting.'
'Leave it alone for a minute, can you?'
Ellen risked slitting her eyes and saw that the upper half of the rest of the sentence had crept into view.
. . . would have the worst
she couldn't avoid glimpsing before she clicked the mouse to close the page. She wanted to blame Hugh for her nervousness, and wished she didn't have to ask 'Why?'
'It wasn't what I rang about. It's Rory.'
'Has he got you acting as his secretary now? Go on then, put him on.'
She was so concerned to shut down the computer, if only since it was a distraction, that she didn't immediately notice Hugh's pause. 'I can't,' he said.
'Don't tell me he wants you to do his talking for him as well.' As the screen turned black, exhibiting her pale blob of a face, Ellen raised her voice in case she could be overheard. 'He's good enough at talking to my editors about me when I didn't ask him to. Is he sorry now he did? He ought to tell me to, well, he can't to my face, but he ought to tell me himself.'
'It isn't that,' Hugh protested in something like anguish. 'I said I'd tell you about him.'
'When did you say that?'
'When I spoke to Charlotte.'
Ellen couldn't help growing resentful, however prematurely. 'You were speaking to her about . . .'
'What've we been talking about? My brother. Why are you making this harder for me?'
'I'm sure I wasn't aware that I was.'