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By Root 762 0

quickly. It could have lasted only two or three minutes. It was fought at astonishing speed, with a ferocity to which the leisurely preamble had given no clue. The clash of steel was a bright dissonant sound in the still of the morning. Both men were clearly expert, but the American was nimbler and wounded the German to end the contest with a slash to the neck that sent arterial blood in a crimson spray across the grass. The German staggered, dropped his sword, pulled off his gauntlet and held out his hand to his opponent. His wound was bleeding copiously, but he ignored it, breathing heavily still from the exertion of the fight, honour satisfied. You could actually hear the blood droplets raining on the grass at his feet in the silence of the forest with the rhythm of his pumping heart as the German’s face paled to pewter and the life pumped out of him. He staggered again. Fischer will not have his coven after all, I thought. Göring still had his hand extended. The American closed and shook it and said something I didn’t catch, his tone conciliatory, the insult forgotten, all now a pantomime of manly fraternal concern. And the German smiled. And then Crowley was there, from nowhere at the German’s side, as sad-faced Giuseppe gathered the discarded weapons from the ground, and Crowley was doing something I couldn’t make out with his hands and a black handkerchief around the area of the wound. And the bleeding stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. It froze on the air and shrank and vanished from the grass. And spots of colour appeared like small pink commas in the German’s cheeks. And his breath, which had been ragged, began to regulate and deepen.

Ja, he growled to Crowley, still weak. Ja. Gut.

And I heard Crowley say to him, you’ve lost blood, perhaps as much as a quart of it. Drink milk and porter. Eat red meat. Have the meat served to you rare. Rest and you’ll be fine by this time tomorrow. And with an arm on Fischer’s shoulder, the wounded German led our lurid procession back to the house for breakfast. I was at the rear, trailing Giuseppe, with his burden of discarded duelling armour and bloodied antique weaponry. My own blood pounded against my temples and there was bile, sour in my throat. I badly needed a cigarette but knew that smoking one would make me feel even worse than I did. I looked around, wondering vaguely where it was they were keeping the boy, their sacrificial. All my thoughts were becoming vague, my mind wearied by the persistent heat and sickness of infection.

And Crowley was suddenly in front of me, the vista darkened by his looming shape, his eyes on fire, the strange whorls and patterned stitching of his tunic like a maze through which my own eyes travelled and were lost. And I felt him take my injured thumb and slip from it the bandage I’d improvised, gluey now and cloying with decay. And he put my thumb into his mouth and sucked. He sucked the infection out of me. I felt the poison lifted out of me. There’s no other way to describe the feeling. And I shivered and was well again.

Eighteen

In the Windmill on Lambeth High Street, the bell tolled for last orders. Through the little speakers on their shelf behind the bar, Marvin Gaye lamented his good friend Abraham. An inch of Director’s bitter sat neglected in Seaton’s glass. He slipped Pandora’s journal into its oilcloth and put it in his jacket pocket. He drained his pint and walked the short journey home.

Lucinda was seated on the sofa, her legs drawn up under her, sketching with charcoal on a pad. The hi-fi was playing. Seaton recognised the Cowboys International album. It was an old favourite of hers, a record she played a lot. But the volume had been turned very low. She was listening to it more for the comfort of sound than for the music. She was playing it for company. There was a shot glass of Chartreuse at her elbow, casting a green shadow across the arm of the sofa in the streetlight coming through the half-pulled blind behind her.

‘How was the pub?’

‘Empty.’

‘Just you and your cider-drinking blonde, then?’

‘And the landlord.