The Murdstone Trilogy Read online

  For Elspeth, as in all things

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Book One: Dark Entropy

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Book Two: Warlocks Pale

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Book Three: Untitled

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Book One

  Dark Entropy

  1

  The sun sinks, leaving tatty furbelows of crimson cloud in the Dartmoor sky. From somewhere in the bracken, tough invisible ponies huff and snicker. Final calls: rooks croaking homeward, a robin hoping for a last territorial dispute before bedtime. Voles scuttle to holes, their backs abristle with fear of Owl. It is early spring. Lambs plead for mothers. Below ground, badgers, ripe and rank with oestrus, prepare themselves for the night’s business. A fox flames its ears and clears its throat.

  Darkness takes possession of the earth, then the sky. Now the only light is small and square. It comes from the window of an isolated cottage. To be exact, it comes from a Habitat anglepoise lamp hunched upon a small folding table inside and below the window. The lamp shares the table with a plate upon which tomato sauce has congealed, a bunch of keys and a somewhat out-of-date London A to Z.

  These things, and the cottage, belong to Philip Murdstone, who sits, still wearing his overcoat, gazing into the illusory heat of his coal-effect electric fire. He is holding, and sometimes remembers to drink from, a pint glass containing cloudy cider from the two-gallon plastic container on the floor next to his chair. The false fire sits on the hearth of a gaping fireplace formed from large, irregular blocks of granite.

  On the mantelpiece a small number of trophies gleam faintly. One is a slab of glass, or more probably Perspex, the accolade buried within it only readable from an oblique angle. Another is a rather kitsch statuette of a child sitting cross-legged intent upon a book. There are three others, and all five are in need of dusting.

  For some time now, since well before sunset, Philip Murdstone has been reciting a brutal phrase as if it were a mantra that might console him.

  It is: I’m fucked.

  It has failed to console him.

  Usually, in his life as well as his fiction, Philip tends to leave the weightier questions unanswered; now, in self-lacerating mode, he addresses them. Or, rather, it. His bitter self-interrogation has resolved itself into a single query: why has he agreed to sell his soul?

  Answer: because he is broke. Skint. Poor. He is a poor man. Famous – OK, well-known – but a pauper. This ugly truth frequently visits him in the dark marches of the night. He tries to deflect it by turning on his bedside radio and losing himself in BBC World Service programmes about leech farming in Cambodia or the latest dance craze in Saudi Arabia, but it doesn’t always work.

  His penury had not always dismayed him; there was after all, an honourable tradition of writers living in poverty. Russian ones, especially. Dying in poverty, however, had less appeal. Dying of poverty had none at all.

  Philip knows why the sales of his books are in drastic decline. It has nothing at all to do with their quality. He buys the Guardian every Saturday, Brian at the corner shop handing it, in its plastic sheath, over the counter as if it were a pornographic version of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He also subscribes to The Author. So he knows what’s going on. Oh yes. Writers no longer work in solitude, crafting meaningful and elegant prose. No. They have to spend most of their time selling themselves on the fucking internet. Blogging and tweeting and updating their bloody Facebook pages and their wretched narcissistic websites.

  Minerva has mentioned his failure to do likewise on several occasions.

  ‘But it has nothing to do with real work, Minerva. Surely you can see that.’

  ‘I do see that, Philip. I’m not actually a fool, you know, even though I am your agent. But it has a very great deal to do with money. Gone are the days when you simply write a jolly good book and wait for the queues to form. Readers need to be friended, darling. They need to be subscribers. They need to be followers. You can’t just sit in splendid isolation. Not that your isolation is particularly splendid, is it?’

  But he’d refused to do any of it. Not that he was a Luddite, by any means. Not at all. He regularly caught the monthly bus to Tavistock with his handwritten list of Things To Find Out About and spent a good hour, sometimes more, at one of the library’s computers. He considered himself a bit of a dab hand at Googling. That was work. That was useful. The rest of it, though, the incessant, vacuous web-witter … No. No!

  He’d regarded himself as a dignified – all right, stubborn – refusenik. Until now. Now – what a day of ugly truths it was turning out to be! – he was forced to admit that he had deluded himself. Led himself up his own tiny garden path. The absolute bloody fact of the matter was that he had allowed himself to be left behind. He was like some ancient artificer – a clockmaker, perhaps – who looks up from his bench to discover the world has gone digital and that his days are numbered. Or a loyal and expert employee who goes to work one day to find that he has been replaced by a bit of software devised by a teenager in Bangalore.

  He, Philip Murdstone, had become – the very word had a murderous thud in it – redundant.

  He gulps scrumpy, because even that isn’t the worst of it.

  Oh no.

  Because, swelling and looming over the horizon of his own small tragedy, cometh the Ultimate Cataclysm. The ascendancy of the darkly glittering Californian Overlords of Cyberspace, those latter-day Genghis Khans sweeping civilization aside, burning libraries, impaling editors in long rows, razing ancient honey-coloured colleges and glass towers alike in a venal and rapacious lust to control language, turn authors into drones servicing its throbbing Amazonian hive and children into passive dabbers at electronic tablets freeloading downloads. And soon, their philistine conquest achieved, the Overlords will stand there in their ironically democratic jeans and T-shirts, surveying the wasteland with their hands on their hips, at the head of vast phalanxes of slobbering intellectual property lawyers, sneering at the last writers still able to crawl and say, ‘You got a problem, you backward-looking ink-addicted Neanderthals? What was that? Who said “copyright”? Drag that fuckin’ nostalgia junkie up here, boys, and break his goddamn fingers.’

  As Minerva had rather chirpily reminded him.

  ‘It’s all going to go pear-shaped when Apple rules the world, darling. So if you’re a writer the only sensible thing to do is make a ton of money before it happens. And you’re a little late off the starting block, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  There was worse yet. He is in love with her. Hopelessly – and that is the mot both juste and triste – in love with Minerva Cinch. And, although the gooey cliché makes him atrabilious, it had been love at first sight. On his part.

  Their first meeting had been in the foyer of a Marriott hotel. He had just scooped the Blyton Prize and a Costa for Last Past the Post, and she’d walked in and scooped him. He’d had no idea what a literary agent might look like. Intense and bespectacled, perhaps. Middle-aged, at least. And then this astonishing creature had swanned in, turning all h
eads, and exclaimed, ‘Philip Murdstone! I feel like I’ve known you for years! Let’s have a glass of bubbly and talk about fame.’

  He had almost swooned like a callow girl in a bodice-ripper. And ever since, after their increasingly infrequent meetings, he would fantastically eroticize their brief and businesslike kisses.

  He does so now, groaning into his scrumpy. Like most solitary men, he has a wide repertoire of groans.

  He’d just once asked her out on a date. It had taken him a month to crank himself up to it. She’d turned him down, fairly gently, giving him to believe that it was her unnegotiable principle that professional and emotional relationships should not overlap. Actually, ‘cross-contaminate’ was the word she’d used.

  He is also afraid of her. He’d been all right with this at first. Fear and attraction share chambers in the human heart, after all. But after a while fear had commandeered most of the space and furniture in that cramped accommodation. He was afraid of her not only because she was (he bitterly assumed) more experienced in the bedroom department than he was. No, it was more that she lived confidently in a world that he both despised and depended upon. She knew about the publishing business, whereas he only knew about writing.

  In so far as he deigned to think of it at all, Philip pictured publishing as a vast river fed and polluted by unmapped and unpredictable tributaries. He had no idea how its flow worked. Where its snags and shallows, its navigable channels, were. Minerva did, though. By God, she did. She stood gorgeous, masterful and unshaggable at the helm of the SS Teen Lit, steering it through perilous currents and gaping alligators while he, the award-winning Philip Murdstone, clutched white-knuckled at the rail.

  Part of it, of course, was that he always went to her. Apart from one aborted occasion. She would send for him, and he would go. Eagerly and hopelessly, as he’d gone today. To that bloody hell hole, that stew, that sump, London.

  2

  ‘Table for two,’ she’d said, breezing in. ‘Name of Cinch. Thanks.’

  Philip had ordered the Mexican Platter and been given an enormous square plate upon which, apparently, a cat had been sick in neat heaps around a folded pancake. The heaps were necklaced together by what looked like thin red jam. One of the things the cat had eaten was green.

  Minerva used an opaline fingernail to remove a pomegranate seed from her teeth. She dabbed it onto the tablecloth. In its tiny smear of red flesh it resembled something left over from the dissection of a small mammal.

  She said, ‘I think the problem is, darling, that you’ve lost your appetite.’

  ‘No,’ he said robustly. ‘This is delicious, honestly. You can’t get this sort of thing in Devon.’

  Minerva held her hand up. ‘I’m not talking about the food, Philip. I’m talking about your work. And not just your work, OK, but about your motive.’

  ‘Ah,’ Philip said. He poured more Moldovan Pinot Grigio into his glass, pretending to be thoughtful. ‘What do you mean, exactly?’

  She sighed like a teacher. ‘This isn’t easy for me, OK? But let’s get down to basics. Philip, why do you write novels for kids, sorry, young adults?’

  ‘Well, God, what a question. I mean. You’re my agent.’

  ‘Yes, for my sins. So. You write for kids because you have a unique insight into the pain of childhood. No one, and I mean no one, has ever written so sensitively, so poetically, about a child with learning difficulties as you did in First Past the Post. A wonderful, wonderful book. It deserved all those prizes. It broke new ground. It made Asperger’s cool.’

  ‘Last,’ Philip said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘It’s Last Past the Post. You said First.’

  ‘Sorry. Anyway, you’ve made that whole area, you know, boys who’re inadequate, your own. Which may be why no one is writing that kind of thing any more. In your five lovely sensitive novels you’ve said all there is to say.’

  ‘Well, gosh, I don’t know about that. I mean, in the new book I think I’ve gone into a whole new, er, dimension.’

  ‘You mean football?’

  ‘Well, not just the football …’

  ‘The football is cool,’ Minerva said. ‘Definitely a selling point right now.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not really about football, obviously.’

  ‘Right, OK, and that’s Problem One. Have you ever actually played football, darling?’

  ‘Well, no, not really, but—’

  ‘I didn’t think so. But that doesn’t matter, you were about to say, because Sent Off isn’t really about football. It’s about a sensitive adopted boy of mixed race with learning difficulties who’s good at football and believes his real father might be a Premiership footballer and so he sets out to make contact with him and gets rejected and then realizes that he doesn’t need a paternal role model because he has his own inner strengths. Basically.’

  ‘Well, yes, and—’

  ‘And I can’t sell it,’ Minerva said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that I’ve walked the length and breadth of this city on my knees and begged and wept and no one wants to publish another book about sensitive retarded boys. Even with football in it.’

  ‘Ah,’ Philip said. He gulped wine.

  Minerva studied him. He was still good-looking, in a crumply vicar sort of way. He was still recognizably the seriously smiling young man whose photograph appeared on the jackets of his books. The hair was untouched by grey, and it was rather sweet that even at his age he still didn’t know where to get a decent cut. The skin tone was starting to go, though; his face had the texture of an apple that had been left just a teeny bit too long in the fruit bowl. She wondered, briefly and more or less professionally, whether he’d had any sex recently. Since Tony Blair was Prime Minister, say. She dabbed the edges of her lipstick with the paper napkin, sighed, and put the boot in.

  ‘And, darling, I’ve just seen the sales figures for Waldo Chicken.’

  Bravely, he looked at her.

  ‘Three hundred and thirteen,’ she said.

  ‘Christ. No. But – but it got great reviews, Minerva!’

  ‘One great review. In Merry-go-Round. By Toby Chervil. Who owes me a favour. About whom I know a thing or two. To be fair, there’s also been a couple of so-so blogs, but you won’t have seen those, of course.’

  Philip had the stricken, disbelieving face of a man who returns home to find a dead cow in his living room.

  After several attempts to say something angry or dignified he blurted ‘What are we going to do?’

  Minerva reached across and laid a gentle hand on his wrist. ‘Move on,’ she said. ‘Surprise everybody. Get hungry again.’ She removed the hand and wiggled it at the waiter who had been leaning on the bar, ogling her. He came over to the table as though it were only one of several entertaining options available to him.

  ‘Some sing else?’ he said.

  ‘Fantasy?’ Philip repeated the word in a whisper, as if it were something shockingly filthy that might have been overheard at the neighbouring tables.

  ‘Or, to be more precise,’ Minerva said, ‘High Fantasy. Sometimes spelled Phantasy, with a pee-aitch.’

  ‘And what is that when it’s at home in its pyjamas?’

  ‘Tolkien with knobs on,’ Minerva said. ‘Necromancers. Dark Forces. Quests. For Mystical Objects that have got lost, usually. Goblins, gnomes, faeries, often also spelled with a pee-aitch. Dwarves. Beards. Time and dimension shifts. Books with a deep serious message that no one understands. You know.’

  ‘Oh, God. Minerva, you can’t be serious. You know I can’t write that stuff! I hate Tolkien. I mean. Bloody pretentious escapist nonsense, isn’t it? And you know, come on, it’s not my genre.’

  ‘Philip, darling. You are actually in no position to get all mimsy about your genre. Your genre, which you more or less invented, OK, the Sensitive Dippy Boy genre, lovely as it is, isn’t selling. Fantasy, on the other hand, is flying off the shelves. It’s selling by bucketloads, contai
n-erloads, downloads. You know why? Because it’s what kids want to read. Especially sensitive dippy boys.’

  Philip managed a reasonably good impersonation of a British POW ignoring a serious flesh wound. ‘You can be harsh, Minerva. Did you know that? This pudding is disgusting, by the way.’

  ‘I told you not to order it. Now listen, OK? I’m going to tell you something. Three months ago, a manuscript landed on my desk. A huge great wodge of paper, typed. Years since I’d seen such a thing. I nearly put my back out trying to lift it. It was called The Talisman of Sooth.’

  Philip groaned.

  ‘The author is a Baptist minister and part-time masseur from Huddersfield. He wrote it, he said, in a three-month phrenzy of inspiration. I skimmed the first couple of chapters, then gave it to Evelyn to read.’

  ‘Evelyn?’

  ‘Evelyn Dent, my PA. She likes that sort of thing. She came in late the next day, all hollow-eyed, and said it was triff. So I gritted my loins and had another go at it. It had no structure, no character development, just one mad thing after another at breakneck pace. Dead religious, of course. The White Necromancer turns out to be a thinly disguised Jesus in a pointy hat.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ Philip said, ‘they usually—’

  Minerva raised a shapely hand to silence him. ‘Three weeks later – just three, darling, OK? – I sold The Talisman of Sooth to Pegasus Books for an advance of … well, let’s just say not far short of a bent banker’s bonus. Plus, there are so many American publishers climbing all over each other to get it that I’m going to have to hold an auction. And last week I agreed a fee of a half of a mill for the computer game rights. I’m flying out to LA on Tuesday to close the deal.’

  Philip shook his head slowly. ‘The world’s gone mad,’ he said, as if he were alone.

  ‘The dogs bark but the caravan goes by,’ Minerva said.

  He squinted at her suspiciously. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means, darling, that you’ve got to decide whether you are a tethered dog barking in the night or part of the caravan. Or the bandwagon, if you prefer. Do you know the last thing Wayne Dimbleby at Pegasus said to me, after we’d shaken hands on the Talisman deal? He said, “Minerva, dear heart, you don’t happen to have any more where this came from, do you?” He was practically begging. “I might have,” says I.’ She leaned back in her chair and fixed her client with a firedrake eye.