Fantastic Mr Norris

He knew what lay beyond the door. Somehow, that did not inspire confidence in him. He couldn’t help but be reminded that he was the only person who knew.

He expected to find mountains of books, teetering precariously, or stacked as obstacles by the one, iron, spiral stairwell that plunged through both storeys of the apartment. Like the skeleton of a snake, it formed a backbone for the clutter.

He expected to find chipped china cups, filled with cold dregs of tea. He expected to find thick, velvet curtains drawn so closely and for so long that they hung stiff as sculpted banners, rendered colourless by the dust that plastered them.

He expected to find an unmade bed, and a dirty armchair with bald arms and a well-worn hollow for reflection. Mr Norris never let anyone into his lair, even cleaners. He would have taken care to ensure his environment progressed past lived-in disarray to the mess of neglect and abandonment. That would make it easier to leave unnoticed.

Horace knew this as the result of his spying. He had waited so long to approach the place in person only because the endeavour was a risky one. At the thought, he felt a chill in his three-hundred-year old bones. He had assumed, when he swore the oath of the Hunters, that it would be the opposite, that each lifetime of experience would make him sharper, quicker, meaner. He had not imagined that he would ever feel weary.

Rarely, he reflected, did a naturally born human discover the secrets of unlife and immortality. Rarely were new Hosts made. When they were, they needed to be dealt with expediently, which was where the Hunters of the Order of the Feather came in.

Immortality made for reckless mortals, who chose to disregard nature, and thus the forces to which death bows. There could be no man more fearsome than he who is master of his own destiny. A man who mastered his own destiny necessarily mastered the destinies of others. He made himself a god.

That was all the motivation Horace needed. With cooling sweat on his hands, he gripped the doorknob and turned it.

He had a lily, something recently touched by Norris, with which to thwart him. He also had his staff, empowered by the familiar whose skull was embedded in it. This Host would not live to spread infection in the world, or to cause any problems that might begin with him.

‘It all began with Mr Norris,’ Horace intoned, for the sake of saying something. A smile of anticipation graced his lips, where it slanted at odds with the rest of his grim expression.

With a groan of protest, the door swung open. Darkness caved in, making way for the light that glowed at Horace’s fingertips, and in the eyes of his staff. Dust moats swirled in the dim light, attracted to the faint aura that swam into the void where life had long since ceased to be. No answer echoed out of that blackness. If there had been any, the apartment had swallowed it whole.

Horace did not bother to speak again. In the same way that small animals possess an extra sense for pricking in times of danger, he had become attuned to the presence of death in places.
Now, he sensed a trap.

There was a malice in the quiet here. It was a quiet of waiting. The void which swallowed sounds might have had teeth, and somewhere on the periphery of Horace’s vision, they were smiling. Their grin was a familiar greeting for death.

He stared further into the emptiness, and finality stared back. It was a skull, with deep sockets for cradling gloom, for only predators truly saw in the darkness. Those sockets were pits which drew in other, living eyes like black holes. Cheekbones could be seen in arches that led to other rooms. Worst of all, however, the skull had that terrible mouth– a lipless maw with a missing tongue, the better to speak silence.

Silence, Horace reflected, was more terrible than words.

Feeling like a dreamer on the frontier of existence, he moved soundlessly through the first room. He was careful not to touch any of the books, lest the more magical of them also be imbued with traps. He made as little impression on the junkscape as a dreamer, gliding ghostly in the world that shaped him and was shaped by him in ways he was blind to.

In the manner of dreams, he was drawn to the object of most significance. In the second room, on a round, polished table like a frozen lake that had collected a dusting of snow, was a piece of paper.

Beside it was wax, blood-red, for the making of a seal. A brand in the shape of a raven lay there, along with a quill, recently discarded and still bleeding ink. Horace had no doubt that the things it had been forced to write had mortally wounded it.

He peered closer at the paper, expecting obscenities. He might find a malevolent spell there, he thought, or some pact for the enrichment of devils. Perhaps it would be runes that sculpted the vile thing, or maybe something worse. Doubtless, this writing was the making of a deed.

Horace saw that he had guessed partly right. It was not the kind of deed he had been expecting.

‘A will,’ he exclaimed, hushing himself immediately. He spun around to see whether anyone had noticed his mistake. When nothing snatched him from beyond a veil or curtain, he read on.

In the event of my death, I name Abel Corrin trustee of my estate and sole beneficiary of my will.

The entirety of my wealth, comprising all monies held in my bank accounts, the details of which I list, my personal chattels and my apartment at 43 Lestrange Road are to go to him.

Signed, Emmanuel Norris

31 October 1859.

Horace turned note over, but there was nothing on the back. Who was this being left for? The police? Or had the writer been interrupted...

The light at his fingertips was extinguished by his own sharp intake of breath. His concentration was spoiled, and his spell sputtered out. A faint shape emerged through one of the archways.

‘You must be Horace Barrister.’ The voice purred, as lithe and cat-like as the figure now bandying out of the darkness.

Horace gulped. ‘You must be the abomination.’

In the back of his mind, he rehearsed the banishing spell. His fingers curled tighter around the stem of the lily, which crushed beneath them, releasing a smell of cut grass.

‘Must I be?’ There was a quick grin, like an exposed hand of cards. It was the only trick this magician had ever mastered.

He did not look the way Horace remembered. Of course, he must have already switched bodies. That meant there was a corpse in here, somewhere. This younger body must have belonged to the heir.

‘They say you see green fields when you die,’ Mr Norris changed his tone, so that his words were like claws stroking the prey he toyed with. ‘I know such things, for death and I are well-acquainted, though I will never know her touch myself. We are like lovers who but meet on the boulevard, share embraces, and then part.’

He clicked his tongue, and his lips bent into a smile– a sharp sickle for reaping fear. He stroked its edge with a long, needling finger. In the darkness, Horace saw that his skin had a pearlescent glow. He was his own source of illumination, and by his light, his fingertips were as the points of a pitchfork. It was bone that was exposed there.

The magician saw that he had noticed.

‘Unfortunate,’ he admitted. Only the slightest hesitation gave away his mannerism as rehearsed. ‘I did not foresee such consequences when first I broke death’s heart. The spread of decay has stopped now, though I will concede that for a day or more, it was rabid. Thankfully, I have gloves to cover what remains.’

‘We should learn from our scars,’ said Horace, in a voice that quavered. It faltered and petered out, just as his flame had done.

‘We?’ The magician’s voice leaned, like a dagger jabbed at the Hunter. Norris was comprised of daggers, barbs, hooks and serrated edges. Like a switch-blade knife, he only chose to show so many at any given time– in the flashing of his smile, the fanning of his fingers, the swishing edges of his cape and the lance-like piercing of his eyes. The rest were always hinted at, lying just beneath the surface.

But this man was not Norris.

Horace knew it in his heart. Norris was unmatched. Norris was smooth. Though he was a near perfect imitation, this man faltered. So, then, Norris had made another Host. There were very few Egyptian tablets left in the world, and only one of the original ones could be used to create a new immortal. That must have been what was delivered as a present, to the cottage with the crumbling garden walls.

‘You are not the monster I seek,’ he said, ‘and that is the worse for you. I can dispatch you easily. I suppose your master set you up here as a decoy, so that he could flee.’

The imitation had no time to say anything. Horace snatched the will off the table. He knew it would be written in the other man’s hand– Norris wouldn’t have risked touching anything when he was expecting visitors. That was why he had declined to wield his own weapons.

A second later, the spell was sparking at Horace’s fingertips. It wasn’t a sparking of fire, but rather of blackness. The void that always crouched behind reality was flashing through the hole Horace had cut for it, waiting for permission to drag a soul into its depths.

There was an explosion of un-black, and the puppet crumpled.

His master brought the new-forged iron crashing down.

‘Not even fire can thaw you now,’ he said.

The blow was like an icy gale. First Horace’s muscles ached with the stiffness of permafrost. Then, he stopped feeling altogether.

‘Did you think you could outsmart me?’ Norris asked, still holding the tip of the sword to his frozen opponent. ‘Did you really believe I would trust myself to soul an amateur body, and then appear in public before fleeing the country?’ He laughed, mirthlessly.

‘I am not a fool. I know all about you who watch me. I don’t need these possessions, anyway.’

He crossed the room, parting dust motes, and snatched the hastily forged will off the table. By magic, a fire sprang up crackling in the grate, and hungrily consumed the evidence.

‘I knew I couldn’t stay in this body,’ he said. ‘A dead body is never a wise choice, though for a while it was the only choice. Theatrics and eccentricity have concealed the worst of who I am, but I cannot remain in this shell. All of you, who call yourselves Order but live in a frantic state, know my name and face. That is as well.’

Horace felt fever scald his throat, melting just enough of the ice that he could rasp hoarsely. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The more famous I am, the more my absence will be noticed. How will any of your brothers doubt you did your job when they find my body here, not just dead, but soulless. They know there are only two things in the world that can leave a corpse like that.’

Where he knelt on the floor, Horace’s eyes were wide with horror. He was too cold to blink, or look away. ‘Reaping,’ he said, ‘and abandonment by a Host…’

Norris smiled. ‘Exactly. By this time tomorrow, I will be Horace Barrister, the man who came close enough to be quarry to be spied on, so that he could be impersonated flawlessly. I will be Horace Bannister, whose immortal body is immune to rot. I will be Horace Bannister, who caught the most wanted ghoul in four centuries.’

‘No,’ said Horace, feebly.

‘Yes,’ the magician told him. ‘Oh, yes.’