Beneath Ceaseless Skies #192 Read online

  Anyway, he opened the bottle, and the scrap of something didn’t immediately turn to dust, so he was either wise or lucky (and my entire life is a monument to the slightness of the difference between those two). He spread the scrap out on his kitchen table, and I saw it was parchment, with writing on it.

  What does it say?, I asked him. He looked at me. He knew I couldn’t read, because he’d tried to teach me. I don’t know, he said. Here, look for yourself.

  I looked. Meaningless.

  He said he thought it was probably Greek, because they use different letters; and if so, it was possible that the bottle had drifted all the way from Constantinople. Possibly, he said, it was some incredibly valuable piece of knowledge, so rare and precious that it had to be preserved at all costs, so that when the Turks came with their great cannon and blew down the walls, some monk or clerk had written his great secret on a bit of parchment, thrust it into a bottle and thrown it from his window into the sea, just before the door of his cell burst open and the Turks rushed in and killed him. But the bottle and the secret floated away, safe and preserved, like pickled cabbage, and bobbed around in the wild, soft sea for a hundred years, until eventually it washed up on the west coast of Wales, on a day when a sharp-eyed boy just happened to be passing—

  He talked like that; I think it’s from him that I picked up my ear for poetry, or at least for the mighty line, the sonorous phrase that sounds fine and doesn’t mean very much. In any event, he gave me back the bottle but kept the scrap of writing to show to his bishop, who was a very learned clerk and could read Greek, and who would be able to tell whether it really was a great and wonderful secret or just some nonsense. I was happy enough with that; I’d pleased my friend the priest, and I got my fourpence for the bottle, and I thought nothing more of it for a very long time.

  But when I’d made my first big score and was suddenly taken rich, I went back home to show off, like you do, and when I called to see the priest they told me he was dead; died in Cirencester, of the plague, and there was a new priest now, if I wanted to see him about anything. I felt sorry for my friend, and vexed that I couldn’t ask him what the scrap of writing had turned out to be, but I guessed it was just luck—bad in his case, just as mine is nearly always good, two sides of one coin, which is almost certainly a plated fake, thin silver back and front and base old copper in the middle.)

  * * *

  My mother was always bottling things, putting them up in jars, preserving. She told me, it’s very important to seal the jar well, to keep the air out, or otherwise it’ll spoil.

  Whoever sold master Cork the bottled demon obviously knew that; hence the thick dollop of beeswax. A demon is bad enough, but a spoilt demon doesn’t bear thinking about. A sealed empty bottle, however, is a dose of perfectly preserved nothing. I pared away the wax with my knife and drew the cork.

  * * *

  Master Morley, the one who came to a bad end not so long ago, once tried to sell me a play about demons. The lead was a famous German doctor who sells his soul to the devil—a fine hook for a play, but he didn’t make very good use of it, and two thirds of it was just clowning, which is why I turned him down. He sold it elsewhere and it didn’t do too badly, which only goes to show that I’m not infallible. Ah well.

  The doctor in the play was based on one John Faustus, who really lived, about seventy years ago, in Wittemberg. I used to have a book written by him, in his own handwriting; it’s in Latin, which I came to late in life, and there are large parts of it I couldn’t make head or tail of, but as far as I can tell it’s a book about summoning, controlling, and dealing with demons. If I’d known that at the time, I wouldn’t have bought it, because something like that can get you in a lot of trouble. Once I’d found out, though, I couldn’t bring myself to put it on the fire, it being so old and wise and full of secrets. In the end, I sold it at a loss to my lord Rawley, who likes that sort of thing and can get away with murder. He, so they say, regularly summons demons, and sends them out to bend the winds or fetch him gold from the Antipodes. I’m not entirely sure I believe that, because a man with that sort of power wouldn’t ever be short of money, as my lord so frequently is. I never heard anyone say he keeps his demons in bottles, which raises the question. Where does he keep them?

  * * *

  He rose up out of the bottle like smoke from a chimney on a still day.

  Let me take a moment to describe what I saw. I don’t have master Allardyce’s way with words; I’m essentially a practical man, mundane but observant with a good eye for detail, I’d make a much better witness in a court of law than messrs Allardyce or Morley, though they’d probably get a round of applause from the jury when they’d finished testifying. I saw a sort of plume of dark grey—not really like smoke, because it was gritty and shiny; imagine a column of finely-powdered charcoal rearing up at you out of a bottle. The top of the column spread and billowed out, first into a ball and then into the shape of a man’s head and shoulders, which gradually refined itself, as though an invisible sculptor was working it with his thumbs and fingers, into a recognisable face.

  You’ve been to the Abbey, obviously, and seen the carved grey stone kings and saints; and you’ll have noticed that one or two of them still bear the paint that once decorated all of them. You’ll appreciate, therefore, the enormous difference between a face with skin-coloured skin and hair-coloured hair, and exactly the same shape in dull grey stone. The painted face is immediately recognisable as human—it may not be a very good likeness, it may have a silly expression and its eyes may be far too close together, but it’s unmistakably human. The stone face is far more remote, grander, more abstract. It’s patently artificial, a thing made by one man to represent another, but with interpretation, quite possibly allegory and ulterior meaning. A statue of King John in white marble stands for cunning, cruelty, weakness, deception. Slap a bit of paint on it and you get a pink man with a foolish expression. Well; the face that gradually took shape in front of me stayed basalt grey—read into that what you will. I think that was probably the point.

  To be precise, however; he had a long, thin nose; high cheekbones and a high forehead; small ears; small, full lips; I would say rather a weak chin; completely bald, which suggests to me that the Devil can’t do hair and knows his limitations. The eyes were—well, perfectly executed, let’s say, with heavy eyelids and eyeballs that moved in their sockets, but completely blank, so that I wondered if he could see out of them. I still don’t know; maybe he used a completely different set of senses, or maybe someone was doing his seeing for him and whispering the results in his ear. His neck was long and thin, and his shoulders were slim to the point of being skinny, except that his bones didn’t stick out particularly. On a girl it would’ve been attractive. His arms, when they developed, were similarly thin and soft (I imagine they’d have been soft to the touch, is what I mean), and his fingers were long and delicate, suggesting he’d never done a day’s work in his life. He blinked a lot, I remember, but otherwise kept very still.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He smiled. He had a nice smile. “Hello,” he replied.

  Whatsisname, the fellow who had such a bit hit with Falstaff and Poins a year or so back and then sort of faded away, has a character who reckons he can call spirits from the vasty deep; he’s quite cocky about it, and gets most upset when nobody seems to believe him. I can understand why. It’s rather an extraordinary feeling, the first time you do it. “Who are you?” I said.

  He shrugged, perfectly conveying the information that I’d asked a very bad question, but I wasn’t expected to know any better and so he forgave me. I tried again. “Have you been in the bottle very long?”

  He put his head on one side and thought for a moment. Rather, he acted thought; I wouldn’t have given him a job. “Fourteen weeks, six days, nine hours, twenty-seven minutes. Why?”

  I shrugged. “Was it uncomfortable in there?”

  “No, not particularly.”

  “How did you
come to be in a bottle in the first place?”

  He blinked at me. Another tactless question. I don’t know why, but I found that slightly irritating. In fact, I wasn’t sure I liked him very much. “What do you do?” I asked. “I mean, what are you good for?”

  He grinned. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing shall come of nothing, speak again. If I ask you to do things for me, will you obey?”

  He frowned. “That depends,” he said.

  Ah, I thought. Best to tread carefully from now on. “If I ask you to, will you go back in the bottle?”

  “If you ask it of me, yes.”

  The way he said it put me on notice. I’ve had quite a bit to do with lawyers, worse luck. They have a special relationship with language; absolute precision. “You can go back in the bottle if you like,” I said. “Or you can stay floating there, it’s all the same to me.” You please yourself, I nearly said, but luckily thought better of it. Nothing that could possibly be construed as a command or an instruction. “Are you an evil spirit?”

  His head went on one side again. “There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,” he said. I raised an eyebrow. If he was a demon, was he allowed to say things like that? “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you aren’t an evil spirit.”

  “No.”

  “Are you lying?”

  “No.” He smiled. “But please bear in mind that oftentimes, to win you to your harm, the instruments of darkness tell you truths. That said, I am not of myself evil.” He looked round, and saw a knife lying on my desk, where I’d been sharpening pens. “Neither is that,” he said. “If you see what I mean.”

  I nodded. “Two hundred years ago, when a man was stabbed in a quarrel, the judge would condemn the knife to be legally killed, by breaking or drowning in a well, because it was guilty of murder. I think we’ve moved on a bit since then, though sometimes I wonder. Tell me, do you strike bargains with people?”

  He blinked. “Yes.”

  “Are you expensive?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll bet you are. As luck would have it, however, I have everything I need or could possibly want, so I don’t think you’ve got anything to offer me. Therefore—”

  He blinked again. “Except King Solomon’s ring.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “And a dragon’s tooth, and a living mirror, and the perfectly preserved smile of John the Baptist.”

  I laughed. It was forced, like seakale in March. “Who says I want—?”

  “You’d have bought them if they were genuine.”

  “There’s wanting and wanting,” I said. “True, there are certain things I wouldn’t mind having, quite a lot of them if the truth be told. But not enough to sell my soul for.”

  “You’re putting words in my mouth.”

  Not even with three-foot tongs. “The difference,” I said carefully, “is between want and would like to have. Want implies a certain degree of need, as in the lack of that certain thing being in some sense harmful. Want as a synonym for lack. I can conceive of nothing the lack of which leaves me incomplete or unfulfilled. And certainly not the smile of John the Baptist.”

  He shrugged. “You started it,” he said. “You opened the bottle.”

  “Utterly convinced there was nothing inside it.”

  “You bought me.”

  I shook my head. “I bought a Saxon ring. You were thrown in as a makeweight, and not by my suggestion. I didn’t object to getting you, but there was no conscious volition on my part.”

  He put his head on one side, then shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “In that case, we have nothing to offer each other. Could I trouble you to smear a bit of wax round my cork when I’m back inside? It helps keep the damp out.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  He acknowledged that with a slight dip of his head. “Are you sure there’s nothing you need?”

  “Positive.”

  “You’re complete and perfect in every way.”

  “I suppose I am, yes.” I smiled. “The Lord is my shepherd, therefore shall I lack nothing. It’s the fine dividing line between need and greed, you see.”

  “Or you’re too cheap to pay the price.”

  I breathed out through my nose. “You ought to meet my lord Devereaux,” I said. “There’s a man who wants for nothing, but if he takes a fancy to something, he’s simply got to have it, though the heavens fall. You’d get on well with him.”

  He laughed. “His sort are two a penny. I’m only interested in rarities. Good day to you.”

  He went back into the bottle—well, the way he came out, only in reverse. As soon as I felt it was safe, I jammed the cork in, then dripped the candle over it until it was an engorged, splodgy mess. Then I sat back in my chair, trying to persuade myself that I hadn’t seen any of that, and none of it had actually happened.

  * * *

  “The likeliest explanation is that it didn’t,” said master Decker. “I think what happened was, you fell asleep in your chair after too much sherris sack, morbidly dwelling on how you were offered Doctor Faustus and turned it down. I can see how something like that could eat away at a man’s mind.”

  Master Decker fancies himself as a bit of a scholar. He studied at Cambridge, Paris, and Wittenberg, though I imagine they were glad to see the back of him. He’s rich and wildly extravagant. His father made a fortune in the fullering business, emptying piss-pots right across London in Queen Mary’s time.

  “I know what I saw,” I said. “What you’ve got to tell me is, what do I do now?”

  He poured himself a drink. “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Should I throw the bottle in the river?”

  I don’t think he liked my wine. He sort of nibbled at it and put the cup down. “King Polycrates of Samos was the richest man in the world,” he said, fixing his eyes on a point about a foot over my head. “Aware that his good fortune made him a likely target for the jealous resentment of Heaven, he took his most valued possession, a gold ring that had belonged to his father, and threw it in the sea. Two weeks later, a fisherman caught a particularly fine turbot, so fine that he couldn’t bring himself to sell it, but instead took it to the palace as a gift fit for a king. When they opened the fish, they found Polycrates’ ring in its belly. The very next day, the king took sick and died. Moral; it’s not that easy.”

  I frowned. “All right, I’ll send for a priest. Presumably they’ve got established procedures—”

  Master Decker grinned at me. “That would be an interesting conversation,” he said. “‘Excuse me, reverend father, I bought a devil in a bottle but I don’t want it any more.’ If you want to get yourself burnt alive, there are easier ways, and ones that don’t reflect quite so badly on your friends.”

  He had a point, of course. “A display of sincere repentance—”

  “You could try that, I suppose.” He scratched his ear. “Though what you’ve got to repent of, I’m really not sure. I mean, you haven’t done anything wrong. Repentance when you haven’t actually sinned cannot be sincere, and insincere repentance is vanity and a sin in itself.”

  He gets on my nerves sometimes. “So what are you suggesting? I should just put the bottle on a high shelf and try and forget about it?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” he said gently, “because I can’t think of anything intelligent or sensible to offer you. Just because I can see the glaring errors in your ideas doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve got any better ones. But yes, I suppose that would do as well as anything else. We pray, lead us not into temptation, but it’s a request, not an order. And that fact that we ask Him not to do it suggests that He’s capable of it, and from time to time He does. I’m guessing that the point of this exercise is for you to sit staring at that bottle for a year or so and not open it.” He spread his hands in a rather silly gesture. “That’s just my guess. I could be wrong. I never even took holy orders, so what do I know?”

&n
bsp; “Do you think I imagined the whole thing?”

  He nodded. “That would seem to be the most logical explanation,” he said. “But who knows? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  Helpful as ever.

  * * *

  Later that evening, a boy hammered on the door. His face was black with soot, and he stank of smoke.

  “Come quickly,” he said. “The theatre’s on fire.”

  I walked rather than ran. If you think about the design of a theatre, it’s really just a short chimney. Sure enough, by the time I got there, it was a quarter acre of fallen timbers and ashes. I stood for a while gazing at the mess, and then it started to rain. A bit late, but at least it would damp down the cinders and keep it from burning down half the city.

  I regard myself as a moderately sensible man, which is why my bow has so many strings to it you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a harp. Besides; in a good year, the theatre makes money, in a bad year it loses everything it made the previous season. I could afford the loss of that particular asset; in fact, in the long term I’d be better off without it. More of a hobby than a business, really, or so I told myself, over and over again, as I stared at my bedroom rafters.

  It won’t end there, I told myself. This is just the first act.

  If my life was a play, I wouldn’t buy it. Who on earth would want to watch such a load of old rubbish?

  * * *

  Master Allardyce came to see me.

  “You’re going to love it,” he said. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s the play I was born to write. You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and ask yourself, what’s the point, why does anyone bother, why do we put ourselves through all this misery and aggravation? Well, now I know. This is why. You’ve got to read it. The first scene starts off with—”

  I stuck a bread roll in his mouth. He stared at me for a moment, then took it out. “What?” he said.

  “You haven’t been following the news, have you? My theatre burned down.”