visited with the Tarlocks once, and found them delightful company.
But it wasn’t the Tarlocks he planned to see tonight. He went instead down a winding, lamp-lit lane and knocked at the door of a thin, three-storey house sandwiched between other houses of a similar design.
The door was opened by a rotund man in his sixties wearing pincenez. The top of his head was bald, but stringy grey hair fell around his neck and over the collar of his brown-and-gold jacket.
He took one look at his visitor and the colour drained from his face.
‘Good evening, Plome,’ Crake said.
‘Good evening?’ Plome spluttered. He looked both ways up the alley, then seized him by the arm and pulled him over the threshold. ‘Get off the street, you fool!’ He shut the door the moment Crake was inside.
The hallway within was shadowy at this hour: the lamps hadn’t yet been lit. Gold-framed portraits and a floor-to-ceiling mirror hung on panelled walls of dark wood. As Crake began to unbutton his greatcoat, he glanced through the doorway into the sitting room. Tea and cakes for two had been laid out on a lacquered side table next to a pair of armchairs.
‘You were expecting me?’ Crake asked, bemused.
‘I was expecting someone entirely different! A judge, if you must know! What are you doing here?’ Before Crake could answer, Plome had taken him by the elbow and was hurrying him down the hall.
At the end of the hall was a staircase. Plome steered Crake around the side to a small, innocuous door. It was a cupboard under the stairs, to all appearances, but Crake knew by the prickling of his senses that appearances were deceptive here. Plome drew a tuning fork from his coat and rapped it smartly against the door frame. The fork sang a high, clear note, and Plome opened the door.
Inside was a single shelf with a lantern, and a set of wooden steps leading down. Plome held the fork high, still ringing, and ushered Crake past. Crake felt himself brushed by the daemon that had been thralled into the doorway. A minor glamour. Anyone opening the door before subduing the daemon with the correct frequency would have seen nothing but a cluttered cupboard, probably accompanied by a strong mental suggestion that there was nothing interesting inside.
‘Watch yourself,’ said Plome. ‘I’ll go first. Third step from the bottom will paralyse you for an hour or so.’
Crake stopped and waited for Plome to shut the door, strike a match and touch it to the lantern. He led the way down the stairs, and Crake followed him. At the bottom Plome struck another match and lit the first of several gas-lamps set in sconces on the walls. A soft glow swelled to fill the room.
‘Electricity hasn’t caught on here yet, I’m afraid,’ he said apologetically, moving from lamp to lamp with the match. ‘The Tarlocks banned small generators. Too noisy and smelly, that’s the official line. But really it’s so they can build their own big generator and charge us all for the supply.’
The sanctum under the house had changed little since Crake’s last visit. Plome, like Crake, had always leaned towards science rather than superstition in his approach to daemonism. His sanctum was like a laboratory. A chalkboard was covered with formulae for frequency modulation, next to a complicated alembic and books on the nature of plasm and luminiferous aether. A globular brass cage took pride of place, surrounded by various resonating devices. There were thin metal strips of varying lengths, chimes of all kinds, and hollow wooden tubes. With such devices a daemon could be contained.
Crake went cold at the sight of an echo chamber in one corner. It was a riveted ball of metal, like a bathysphere, with a small circular porthole. He felt the strength drain out of his limbs. A worm of nausea crawled into his gut.
Plome followed his gaze. ‘Oh, yes, that. Rather an impulse purchase. I haven’t used it yet. Need to wait for the electricity to get here. To provide a constant vibration to produce the echo, you see.’
‘I
