Читать книгу Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence - Michael Marshall Smith - Страница 18

The man in the black suit drove. You might think a person in his position would prefer an underling to perform that service, and often that would indeed be the case: him in the back seat, the passenger, looking out, casting blight with his gaze. The only being on hand tonight was Vaneclaw, however, and the last thing you want driving your car is an accident imp. With every hour that passed the old man was feeling more and more awake, too. He wanted to be active, engaged. He desired to be doing things.

And so he drove. Fast.

The big black car flashed along the highway, brushing the edges of small towns, where people would stir in their beds as if soured by a bad dream they would not remember; sometimes arcing long miles through wide, open country, where there was no one and nothing but the occasional nightbird or vole to look up and shiver as it passed.

Finally it got where it was going.

The man parked. He bade the imp stay in the car – on pain of things far worse than death. The imp pointed out, however, that just as allowing one of his kind to drive was a bad idea, leaving one unattended in a vehicle was not a great plan either. The last time he’d been left in a car it had somehow ended up at the bottom of a lake. Upside down.

The old man sighed, then said, ‘Yes, come along then, but keep silent and out of the way,’ on pain of things far worse than death.

‘Right-o,’ Vaneclaw said. ‘I’ll start being silent now, then, shall I?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, bo—’

Seeing the old man’s face, the imp closed his mouth, and followed him along a path towards the cabin at the end. One side of this was mainly made of glass. The interior was dark, but when the man walked right up to the sliding doors, he could see the Engineer sitting waiting inside.

The Engineer stood, came and quietly slid open the doors. He looked the old man in the suit up and down.

‘Where the hell have you been?’

It was an old joke between them.

Fifteen minutes later the two men were sitting on the plastic chairs outside the cabin. The man in the black suit felt the cold but it did not bother him. The Engineer was huddled up in a sweater, two pairs of socks, an overcoat, and a blanket, and had a fresh cup of coffee cradled in his hands. He still felt chilled. Better to have this conversation here than inside, however.

‘How did you find me?’

‘I let my mind wander.’

‘Of course. I felt it this afternoon, reaching out. Someone else did too. I merely wondered whether you’d also had someone watching me all this time.’

‘No.’ The old man raised an eyebrow. ‘Were you trying to hide?’

‘Of course not. I move around because it pleases me, and for other reasons you know full well. Though I’ll admit I was intrigued to see how long it would take you to track me down. Quite some while, it turned out.’

‘No. I only started looking yesterday.’

The Engineer looked surprised. The old man shrugged. ‘Before that … I don’t remember. I woke up two days ago on the terrace of a hotel in South Beach, Miami.’

‘Very hot, Florida.’

‘You’re telling me. Evidently I had been resident in the hotel for three months. I have no recollection of that period. Before that, according to receipts in my suitcase, I spent a number of years in Antwerp, of all places. Prior to that I do start to recall things. The wandering, mainly.’

‘It’s been fifty years. I’m not surprised you can’t remember everything.’

‘That’s just it. I do, before the last few. I recall the moment where I decided that I no longer wished, for a while at least, to actively engage in the course I had pursued for a hundred millennia. I knew I had set countless black deeds and curdled paths in motion, given seed to chaos and sadnesses that would persist without my supervision – including wars that turned out rather better than I’d hoped. I remember decades spent travelling the globe, alone in thought, stalking the mountains and forests and backstreets, sometimes appearing as I am now, at other times as a woman in middle age, occasionally as a large black dog. Even, for a brief period, as a chicken.’

‘How’d that go?’

‘Not well.’

‘But then?’

‘It seems … I fell asleep. Not so that I stopped moving and doing, but so that I lost awareness of myself. I moved as if in a dream, a dream so deep that I was not conscious of either its contents or myself.’

‘And now you have reawoken.’

‘So it appears. Though …’ The old man stopped talking.

The Engineer let the silence rest for a moment. ‘You’re concerned about something,’ he said then, quietly. ‘What is it?’

‘Last night I was in North Dakota.’

‘Very cold, North Dakota.’

‘Disappointingly so. But I tracked down the imp that is called Vaneclaw.’

‘I remember him. Extremely dim.’

‘But also very loyal. I interrogated him, then bade him gather all minions from the area, demons large and small. I looked into the dark void in the centre of each and every one. I found them still loyal too.’

‘Of course,’ the Engineer said, not surprised.

‘Not of course, I’m afraid to say. I suspect it was this that finally drew me back from my slumbers.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘My doubts were first ignited in Florida, where I watched a bad man perform a sacrifice. It was a small act, a breakage, but good enough. It was evidently not the first that he had performed in my name.’

‘So he claimed?’

‘He did not lie. He had a trick that proved he had been rewarded for prior acts of a similar kind.’

‘What strength of trick?’

‘A minor thing with fire.’

The Engineer looked confused. ‘I don’t see the problem. Surely it’s good that fresh acolytes have found the path to you, even while you were … dormant. And specious rewards ensue from their acts of fealty, conferred upon them by the black ether. It was ever thus. Sacrifice begets power.’

‘That’s just it, my friend. I did not feel anything at all from the sacrifice he performed right in front of my eyes.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing. My meeting with the imps and demons of North Dakota confirmed my suspicions. They have prayed and made sacrifice, every day and hour. Countless lives have been blighted by their actions – yet none of that power has found its way home to me. I suspect this may even be at the root of how I lost awareness of myself. The dark charge faded to the point where I slipped into some kind of infernal standby mode.’

The Engineer looked serious now. ‘That’s … very strange.’

‘When did you last check the machine?’

‘Yesterday. It’s working perfectly.’

The old man in the suit suddenly frowned, and turned his head towards the sliding doors.

Hannah had woken first a little before midnight, according to the clock on her bedside table. She was cold. She huddled deeper into her bed sheets and managed to drift back off to sleep.

She woke again an hour later. She was still cold, but something told her this was not what had interrupted her sleep. She lifted her head from the pillow and listened.

After a moment she heard a voice. It sounded like Granddad. Perhaps he was on the phone.

She fell asleep once more, but it was a shallow sleep, and her mind kept working, eventually popping up the observation that Granddad couldn’t be on the phone, because there was no signal here, duh. This observation didn’t know what to do with itself and so it wandered Hannah’s dozing mind, bumping into other ideas and thoughts and fragments of dreams, until eventually it made enough noise to wake her up.

She listened blearily. There was silence, and then she heard a voice again. This time it sounded like an old man, yet not Granddad.

That was strange.

She raised herself up on one elbow, still half-asleep. She’d just about be able to believe that someone had happened to wander by the cabin and decided to stop and have a chat with Granddad, were it not for the fact that (a) he’d said he didn’t know anyone here, and was glad of it, and (b) it was now after one o’clock in the morning.

Also, she thought she could hear the sound of running water, too. And a low, tuneless humming.

She got out of bed.

There was silence on the deck as the two old men watched Hannah approach the sliding doors.

‘Who is this?’

‘My granddaughter,’ the Engineer said. ‘She’s the other person who felt the pressure of your thoughts today. It made the afternoon difficult for her.’

‘She’ll forget. But what’s she doing here?’

‘Staying with me.’

‘Yes, I assumed something of the sort,’ the old man said tetchily. ‘I meant why?’

‘Problems at home.’

Hannah reached the doors and slid one of them open. She flinched as the cold air crept quickly inside. ‘What are you doing out here, Granddad? It’s freezing. And who is this man?’

The man in the black suit stood slowly, towering over her, all the world’s shadows ready at his command. ‘I … am the Devil,’ he said, his voice hollow with the echoes of countless millennia of howling darkness.

There was silence for a moment.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Hannah said. She blinked at him, and yawned massively. ‘Also, Granddad, there’s an extremely large mushroom in our bath.’