The Forever Man (W.A.R.P. 3)

‘What are you?’ Riley shouted at him. And then again: ‘ What are you?’

Garrick cleared his throat. ‘I am death, son. Weren’t you always proclaiming it to any lawman that would give the time of day to a ragamuffin like yourself? Funny that, because I am the law here, sent from God to weed out witches and their familiars.’

Riley righted himself an inch and heard a cable sing. ‘What class of a being are you, is what I mean.’

Garrick, ever the showman, took his sweet time answering, rising silently like a shadow drawn on a string and sashaying into the light. He was a macabre sight to behold: all bones and marble flesh, like a famished statue of his previous self. He turned side-on and performed a casual side shuffle to the altar, then executed a low bow from the waist, his knuckles scraping the floor.

‘I told you, my boy,’ he said, projecting his voice in his best West End posh. ‘I am the Forever Man.’

It was impressive and it was ridiculous and it was pure theatre, and Riley found that the whole performance stirred a pot of feelings in him that he’d just this minute been thinking was empty.

I am terrified.

Garrick saw this and it pleased him, for this entire situation was a new wrinkle in his time. He plonked the length of himself down on the front pew.

‘Don’t be flinching, son,’ he advised. ‘For the Cat’s Collar is on a hair trigger, so she is. Two hair triggers, to be precise. I suppose it really should be round the neck of your Injun princess; after all, she is the one with cat’s eyes.’

Garrick leaned forward and plucked one of the collar’s strings so that it twanged, then laughed. ‘That, my son, is a G. The fake triggers are tuned as a violin. I would force the captives to play the Alleluia. If they reached the end, then the collar would spring open and God had liberated them. One false note and they would end their own lives and prove themselves Satan’s spawn. Now there, Riley, is entertainment at its purest.’

Cat’s Collar.

Riley didn’t need an explanation that witches’ familiars were often cats and believed to be capable of taking human form – and so they would be held in restraints like this one and then forced to fiddle till they died. He also did not need to be told that, in all likelihood, none of the accused had ever survived the device.

The latest in a series of horrors visited by Albert Garrick on humanity.

‘It should amuse you to know that I designed the Cat’s Collar for you. Not for you in specific, you understand. But with you in mind, for you were the best, most natural escapologist I ever saw, apart from myself. So, thinks I to myself, Albert Garrick, you’d best be coming up with something that even the boy Riley could not wriggle from. For that would be the height of embarrassment, would it not? To have a familiar slip the noose, as it were.’

This did not amuse Riley one jot. For it made his predicament all the more hopeless.

‘I should elucidate,’ said Garrick. ‘Fill you in on things. For you are no doubt puzzled as to –’ the illusionist flapped his hands – ‘all of this. Everything that has transpired.’

Riley was happy to let Garrick talk while he studied this Cat’s Collar and determined for himself whether it was as escape-proof as Garrick claimed. Maybe he should even charm the devil a little.

‘Please, master,’ he said, slipping easily into his old supplicant’s tone. ‘Explain these miracles.’

Garrick laughed again, having himself a fine old time. ‘Oho! Master now, is it? And miracles with it. None of your weaselling, my boy. I talk to hear myself talk. For the pleasure of my own voice. So none of your slippery ways, if you please, or I might play for myself a tune on that there collar.’

‘Tell me then, devil,’ spat Riley. ‘Hear your own voice ring out.’

Garrick clapped his hands. ‘Excellent. The rat shows his true colours.’

He patted his waistcoat pockets for cigarettes and matches. Finding both, he fiddled with a silver box until a certain cigarette took his fancy above the others and he extracted it. ‘These made the trip with me. The wormhole giveth and taketh.’

Garrick struck his match and drew in smoke, exhaled to the ceiling and then told his tale – and all the while Riley plotted his escape, as he generally had whenever his master waxed.

‘It was something of a turn-up when you and that American slip of a girl turfed me into the wormhole without so much as a bullseye to light my way and little hope of ever feeling the sun on my face again.’ Garrick’s lips drooped, a clownish grimace. ‘How desolate I was. But then says I to meself: Buck up, Alby. You ain’t dead yet, so there is hope. And I remembered a quote from an old Chinaman, which ran something like Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. And, having not a friend in the universe, I kept the wormhole close, until it became a part of me, but not so as I would dissolve entirely and become a part of it, if you catch my drift. I held on to my soul, if that’s what you want to call it. Bound it up in a skin of hatred.’

He pointed the cigarette at Riley. ‘Hatred for you, my boy, if you want to hear the harsh truth of the matter. For it was you, my own squire, who betrayed his benefactor. After an age, or a moment – for there is no actual time in the wormhole – I happened upon a rift that did not close with the same speed as Charles Smart’s manufactured portals, and so out I shoots into this godforsaken, blighted land without a decent playhouse for miles. Albert Garrick in the blooming countryside, how’s about that? Without so much as a seel-voo-play or howjadoo. And I arrived just in time to take a pork-sticker in the heart. Right through the ticker. And that was it for Mister Garrick, thinks I. Lying there in the mud, a sword in my chest, dying in dank ignorance.’

Garrick took advantage of this natural dramatic break to stand and squash his cigarette beneath his boot heel. ‘But no. It weren’t so. Albert Garrick lived.’

You don’t say, thought Riley but did not say it, for now he was convinced that it was the devil himself who recounted this tale and his terror had amplified to some never previously experienced level.

‘And, what ho, if Albert Garrick did not hop to his feet, sprightly as a Russian tumbler, and pull that blade out of his own chest and stick it into his attacker’s. Tit for tat, says I, but he heard me not for he was stone dead.’

Riley had often declared that Garrick could not be killed, but it was hyperbole, for what he really meant was that Albert Garrick with his particular skills would be extremely difficult to kill; now it seemed he had been literally correct.

Garrick is immortal now. Truly. And seems in better humour. Somehow sane.

‘I hardly blame the bumpkin for having a go, for had I not appeared from the air in a jumble of sparks? And his companion had informed me, before I rolled him into the marsh to lie with his friend, that they had mistaken me for a witch, as the town was blighted with the creatures and they had been dispatched to fetch the Witchfinder General. How delightful, thinks Alby to himself. What a novel way to make use of my talents. And so I lodged here for a spell as Witchfinder.’

He winked at Riley to show his use of the word ‘spell’ had been intended as a little joke. ‘Quite the hit I was, my lad. Standing ovations every night, as it were. Rid the world of a few creatures into the bargain, as more had slipped from the rift than just myself. Horrible things. You wouldn’t believe it. And I was happy for a while. However, my boy, the rift’s call grew stronger every day and I knew it would have me back, but I would sooner dwell in the rookeries and slums of London town than go back in there where my very being would be forfeit. So, Albert Garrick moved on for himself and travelled the world.’

Garrick paused in his telling. ‘On I lived and continued to live,’ he said after a moment. ‘Slings and arrows had a go at my person. Not to mention pestilence and plague, but I shrugged ’em all off. And time too. That weren’t nothing to me, for I am as the tunnel itself, without end. Oh, the things I’ve seen and done. The Americas, my boy. I was over there cutting a broad patch through Chevron Savano’s ancestors, wishing every

one was her. And China too, bringing out opium by the ton. Fortunes I made and lost, and not a fig did I care.’

Garrick stooped to stroke Riley’s hair. ‘For shall I tell you something, son? It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Everything is life and death and blood and pestilence. All a fellow can do is take his amusement where he can. And for me, once I realized the tunnel would not let me pass on, I decided to dedicate myself to taking vengeance on you, boy, as a distraction. I will have my little games, you know.’

Riley needed confirmation. ‘So, you can never be put six feet under?’

Garrick’s expression might have darkened had his complexion allowed it; as it was, his features twisted. ‘Six feet under? Six feet? In Sicily I was buried in a crypt for decades by a band of Mafiosi. They took me for some class of ghoul when their musket shot failed to kill me. Grave robbers dug me up not a month ago. Can you imagine my frustration? My rage? I lay there howling at the stone, gnashing my teeth. After all that time and I almost missed my appointment. Not to mention that I missed witnessing my own marvellosity onstage. You might have died in some trivial manner without me there to have a hand in it.

‘But I lived just the same in spite of the appearance of my skin, which is brought about by a reaction between the wormhole’s particles and the silver I must constantly wear. And now fate has brought us here where all fear me, and my revenge can be more –’ Garrick paused now to choose his words – ‘more leisurely. And then I will move on once again, far away from the damned wormhole.’