Джефф Вандермеер - The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

The door behind him snapped open, and an inexorable force propelled Ambrose back out through the doorway. Landing on his injured leg, he fell and sprawled lengthways across the carpeted hall. Kennett looked down at him for a moment, sniffed, and helped him up.

“Doctor Lambshead is all ready for you,” he said. “Gunderbeg is standing by to eat the demon when it’s cut out, and we have all the recuperative apparatus prepared. Best we get a move on, I think.”

Ambrose looked down at his leg. The bandage of Sekhmet was now just a few strands of rag, and it was being chewed on by a mouth that had grown in his calf muscle, a black-lipped, razor-fanged mouth that was trying to turn itself upwards, towards his knee.

“Yes,” said Ambrose faintly. “If you don’t mind.”

AT NOON THEnext day, his leg salved, bandaged, and entirely demon-free, Ambrose was on the boat train to Dover and thence to Calais, with Kennett keeping company. An uneventful channel crossing was complete by midnight, and after only changing trains twice, they were in Solingen the following morning.

Ambrose spent a good part of their travelling time reading the grimoire that Kennett had handed to him in Edinburgh. The book had come wrapped in a piece of winding cloth cut from the burial shroud of the Scottish sorcerer Thomas Weir, a fabric made to stifle sorcery, indicating that the D-Arc librarian believed the grimoire had the potential to act of its own volition. Accordingly, Ambrose treated it with care, using reversed gloves to turn its pages and marking his place with a ribbon torn from a child’s bonnet.

The grimoire was a typeset version of a much older text. It had been printed in the late sixteenth century, and a note with it attributed the book to the German sorcerer and botanomancer Bertin Zierer, though, as the flyleaf was missing and the original binding has been replaced several times, this was noted as being speculation rather than fact.

The section of the grimoire dealing with the Waldgeist of the Primeval Wood that had once stretched across much of modern Germany was, as per usual, couched in rather vague language, apart from the description of the actual ritual. It did not describe the form the Waldgeist usually took, or go into any details of its powers, beyond a warning that these would be employed against anyone who dared wake it who was “not of the blood of Wotan.” The only clue to the nature of the Waldgeist came from an etching that showed a disc of ground covered in trees rising from a forest. Titled, in rough translation, “Tree Spirits Rising,” it did not help Ambrose very much, though it did make him wonder if the Waldgeist manifested as some sort of gestalt entity composed of a whole section of modern forest.

Apart from the grimoire, the duty librarian had also included a large-scale map of the area around Solingen and some typed pages of research and observation. The map indicated that the locus of the Waldgeist was in the middle of a small but very old wood some twenty kilometers south of Solingen. The notes cross-referenced the ritual cited in the grimoire with other known practices of Teutonic magic, and affirmed that it looked to be complete and not designed to trap or harm the caster by some omission or intentional change.

Shortly before their arrival, both men assumed their appointed disguises, which had been placed by unseen hands in the next-door compartment. Ambrose became a full colonel from the staff sent to join the British forces of occupation on some mission that was not to be denied or enquired about by anyone. Kennett, on the other hand, simply put on a different and more conservative suit, topped with a grey homburg identical to that worn by the late King Edward, and thus assumed the appearance of a mysterious civilian from the upper echelons of Whitehall.

They were met at the Ohligs Wald station in Solingen by a young subaltern of the Black Watch, whose attempt at an introduction was immediately quashed by Kennett.

“You don’t need to know our names and we don’t want to know yours,” he snapped. “Is the car waiting? And our escort?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the young second lieutenant, a blush as red as the tabs on Ambrose’s collar spreading across his cheeks. “As per the telegraph message.”

“Lead on then,” said Kennett. “The sooner we take care of this the better.”

The car, commandeered from the divisional general, was accompanied by four motorcycle outriders and three Peerless trucks carrying the nameless subaltern’s infantry platoon and a machine gun section.

“We hardly need all this carry-on,” protested Ambrose as he settled into the grandly upholstered backseat of the general’s car, and Kennett climbed in next to him. “Surely it would be better for me to get changed and just walk into the wood as a tourist or something?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Kennett. “The fellow who is hoping to . . . carry out his deed . . . is the leader of a gang of militants called Die Schwarze Fahne and they have quite a membership of former soldiers and the like. We’ll have these lads establish a cordon around the wood, then you and I will go in.”

“You’re coming with me?” asked Ambrose. “The grim —”

He stopped himself, aware that the driver and the subaltern in the front seat were so obviously trying to not listen that they must be able to hear everything, even over the noise of the engines as the whole convoy got under way. “That is, the reference is specific about German heritage and the . . . subject’s response if . . . ah . . . in contact with others.”

“M’ grandmother was Edith Adler, the opera singer,” drawled Kennett out of the side of his mouth, so only Ambrose could hear. “So I have a drop or two of the blood. But I’ll keep well back, just the same.”

Ambrose nodded slightly and tried not to show how much he was discomfited by Kennett’s disclosure. Even from such slight information, he would now be able to positively identify the man. Which meant that Kennett was either taking him into some inner echelon of trust, or he didn’t think Ambrose would be around long enough for it to matter.

It only took forty minutes to reach the fringes of the wood. Ambrose sat in the car for a few minutes while everyone else got out, and read the relevant pages of the grimoire for perhaps the twentieth or thirtieth time. The ritual was not complex, but he had to memorise it. It would not be possible to refer to the book in the middle of the process.

He felt quite calm as he slipped the grimoire inside his tunic and did up the buttons. They looked like the usual brass, but were, in fact, silver-gilt, part of the sorcerous protection that Ambrose hoped would help him if things went only slightly awry. Of course, when dealing with an entity like a primeval tree spirit, it was far more likely that if something did go wrong, it would be on a scale so immense that no amount of sorcerous protection would make the slightest difference.

The lieutenant’s platoon, under the direction more of a leather-lunged sergeant than the pink-faced officer, were forming up in three ranks on the verge. The trucks were parked across the road to block other vehicular traffic, and the Vickers machine gun was in the process of being emplaced on its tripod some way off, up a slight rise, to enfilade the road.

Ambrose got out and orientated the map to north by the sun, shifting it slightly to get the road in the right relationship, map to real topography. The map indicated the beginning of a footpath a dozen or so yards beyond the machine-gun position, and sure enough, there was a stone cairn there and a rotting wooden signpost that once upon a time had something written on it.