Chico Kidd - The printer's devil

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The Printer’s Devil

by Chico Kidd

Chico Kidd

113 Clyfford Road

Ruislip Gardens

Middlesex HA4 6PX

England

Tel./Fax 01895 677410

e-mail: chico@nildram.co.uk

website: http://www.chico.nildram.co.uk

Contents

Chapter Page

1 A Warning to the Curious 1

2 Caverns Measureless to Man 7

3 Papers I: The Maiden 13

4 A Weariness of the Flesh 26

5 Renowned be thy Grave 34

6 Papers II: The Homunculus 41

7 Not Exactly Ghosts 52

8 The Ghost in the Machine 58

9 Papers III: The Murders 64

10 Cry Havoc 74

11 Look Not in My Eyes 80

12 Papers IV: The Magus 86

13 Which Can Eternal Lie 96

14 Music Hath Charms 102

15 Papers V: The Demon 108

16 Next Himself in Power 120

17 Thy Form from Off My Door 126

Envoi 135

“Throughout the whole province of Change Ringing, there is no more

delightful method than Stedman. Ringers of methods of all degrees of intricacy

find in it a continual freshness and charm. If we are to seek for the grounds of

such a well-deserved popularity we shall probably be right in ascribing it chiefly

to the varied nature of its work, while at the same time its music has a peculiar

smooth and mellow cadence.”

Rev. C D P Davies, Stedman

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Fabian Stedman who appears in these pages may or may not be the deviser of the bellringing method

called Stedman’s Principle - since reports of his early life conflict. I have followed John Eisel, rather than

Ernest Morris, in locating the young Stedman in London; but as Morris (quoting William Shipway) mentions

“his peculiar production on five bells” being presented to the College Youths in the summer of 1657, we may

suppose the Stedman Papers to commence a little before that time. The date of his apprenticeship is given as

July 7, 1656, when Stedman was aged around twenty-five. If this seems too old for an apprentice to begin

learning his trade, it is after all only tradition which puts the date of his birth as 1631; he was baptised in

December of 1640.

Of course, the people who have life in these pages exist in a world which, although it has this sun and these

stars, is very slightly other than ours, and follows different rules.

I also acknowledge my debt to the real Fabian Stedman, and to John Evelyn, to Victor Hugo and Verdi, to

M R James, and to all the other people who have influenced the story.

C.K.

The Printer’s Devil was first published in June 1995 by Baen Books

Cover art by Newell Convers & Courtney Skinner

1 : A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS

‘“As you are aware, E is the most common letter in the English alphabet and it predominates

to so marked an extent that even in a short sentence one would expect to find it most often...

‘‘“But now came the real difficulty of the inquiry. The order of the English letters after E is

by no means well-marked, and any preponderance which may be shown in an average of a print-

ed sheet may be reversed in a single short sentence. Speaking roughly, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D, and

L are the numerical order in which letters occur; but T, A, O, and I are very nearly abreast of each

other, and it would be an endless task to try each combination until a meaning was arrived at.”’

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Dancing Men

Grey as a flag, the church tower shouldered above trees: trees of so many shades of green that they caught

the eye unawares. They rattled suddenly as a flock of black birds shot skywards, a cloud which broke as soon

as seen.

Four people encased in the hot confines of an elderly Volkswagen Beetle stared at the tower with varying

degrees of frustration.

‘Well, it’s there,’ observed the driver of the car for the tenth time.

‘So why can’t we get to it?’ asked one of his passengers. ‘We’ve been down Church Lane and All Saints

Close, and neither of them were any use at all.’

‘We’re going to miss it if we don’t get there,’ complained the youngest, who was fourteen and inclined to

be impatient.

‘Nobody else’s found it,’ the driver pointed out. “Nothing’s going ding.’

Acar full of bellringers on an outing is not a lovesome thing, especially if all fails to go smoothly. Perfectly

sensible people undergo a metamorphosis which puts Dr Jekyll’s to shame if there is the slightest chance of

not being first at the next tower. Spouses snarl at each other. The day becomes a mad dash from church to

church as tempers shorten. All this is done for pleasure.

‘Look, there’s a footpath sign. I’m going to get out and walk. Can you park here?’

Alan Bellman, a lanky, gangly man who bore a passing resemblance to Leslie Howard, and who had taken

up ringing despite rather than because of his name, sighed, wondering how he had let himself be talked into

coming on this outing. He pulled off the narrow road onto the yellowed grass at its verge, which was baked

sere in that un-English summer.

As soon as the car came to a halt, the family he was chauffeuring - normally as pleasant as one could hope

to meet - scrambled out of the car and headed for the footpath like a panting band of dogs. Young Debbie’s

flip-flops slapped the soles of her feet, and the piebald flies with red eyes which doze upon the fronds of brack-

en in the sun buzzed upwards as the ringers passed them.

Following more slowly, Alan heard a bell sound suddenly, high and unexpectedly musical. Then another,

and the rest of the six followed in close pursuit, swift and sweet as a scale on a glockenspiel. Ahead of him,

Debbie quickened her pace so that her brown legs matched the speed of the bells.

His attention on the pleasing sight of Debbie’s back view in her T-shirt and brief shorts, Alan barely man-

aged to catch a bramble she had brushed aside before it raked his face; then he looked up in pleased surprise

at the church facing him.

Unlike the walls of crumbly sandstone, red as rust, which flanked many of the roads they’d travelled that

day, this tiny church was faced with knapped flint, cold in the sunlight. It was perfectly proportioned: its

dimensions pleased the eye. Out from its tower tumbled the sound of the bells, bright and melodious. A group

of ringers stood outside the open tower door, bright in summery shirts and dresses, almost too exotic for the

quintessence of England in which they stood, surrounded by the silent trees.

Following his passengers, Alan joined the desultory queue, thinking as he watched the rush for bell-ropes

that ‘tower-grabbing’ was a very descriptive term for this activity. He was content to wait: the urgency which

seized most of his fellow ringers was alien to his nature. Maybe, he sometimes thought, this was one of the

reasons why he himself was such an indifferent ringer. Such skill as he possessed, he had learned years ago

to please his then girlfriend - a plan which had misfired when he had turned out ham-fisted. By that time, how-

ever, he himself had met Kim, and married her soon afterwards. Alan smiled a little at the memory of his first

sight of her. For an instant he’d thought her a boy, with her cropped hair and jeans.

Eyes a little out of focus, he watched the ringers and the pattern the ropes made as they bounced up and

down - the way the colours of the thin matted sallies blurred as they moved, red-white-and-blue turning to red

in motion. Then he shook himself and, still listening with half an ear to the quick succession of the bells, wan-

dered into the empty nave of the church.

It had that slightly sad and musty smell of all redundant churches. The worn stone floor was bare, and the

pews had all been removed - no doubt to some pseudo-aged pub or yuppie kitchen. Dust drifted, in its state-

ly way, in the coloured light falling through the stained glass: all that remained to the building of its past. That,

and the bells, and the tarnished wall plaques. Little enough, when you remembered it was the centre of a com-

munity once, and people were christened there, and wedded, and buried in the churchyard outside.

‘Have you rung yet?’ said a voice in Alan’s ear, making him jump.

He shook his head.

‘Go and have a ding, then.’

‘Okay,’Alan said, and went for his grab.

Only the tenor rope was free, but he was content to take the easy option of keeping the rhythm: it was one

thing he could do competently.

“Do you want to play, Alan? Or shall we do some Stedman?”

“No, I’ll bang the drum.”

Having found the rhythm, Alan did not need to concentrate too hard - people who knew told him he should

watch the other ropes, but he usually rang behind by counting the beat - and found his eyes drawn past his fel-

low ringers.

On the walls of the little ringing-chamber hung peal-boards black as ebony, the writing upon them illegi-

ble from where he stood. Newer boards commemorated the coronation of Elizabeth II and the Festival of

Britain, but he could see nothing more recent. It was, however, the old ones which fascinated him.

Alan was a writer by trade and an antiquarian by inclination. Like a jackdaw, he collected old things:

papers, books, paintings; letters, documents, photographs. When he could, he wrote about these things for

magazines: they were his centre and his core, a passion like music was to Kim. Most of the time, though, he

wrote copy for advertisements, this being a more lucrative pursuit.

When the touch was over he stood his bell, tied the rope in that particular knot which novice ringers find

so tricky to master, and crossed to examine the ancient boards. To his considerable disappointment, he found

them largely indecipherable: what writing remained had faded to the state of blind-embossing: raised bumps

of black on black. With some difficulty, he made out a few names - ones whose very shapes were old:

Bartholomew, Tyler, Southwell.

Southwell.

The name snagged at his memory. Behind him, the next relay of ringers pulled off for their own grab, and

the bells’ sound rose once more. Carefully, so as not to knock any elbows, Alan sidled along the wall and out

through the tower door into the churchyard.

It was not as overgrown as he had expected, although the trees crowded in like Tolkien’s Old Forest. Grey

gravestones, encroached by yellow powdery lichens, told the parish story to the early sixties. Alan’s eye was

caught by a fenced area outside the graveyard, and he leaned over the stone wall to see it.

Barred round by rusty rails, and almost obscured by tall grass and cow-parsley, there squatted a massive

tomb. Reminded of E F Benson’s creepy story The Room in the Tower, with its grave outside the churchyard

‘in evil memory of Julia Stone’, Alan, naturally, had to go and look.

Once inside the railings, Alan saw that the monolithic slab atop the tomb was blank save for patches of

khaki lichen and olive-green liverwort and bird droppings. The sides, however, were a different matter.

His heart thumped and his breath came quickly as he saw the carvings. Excitedly he fumbled for his little

fixed-focus camera, but found himself too close to see very much through the viewfinder. He wished Kim, a

professional photographer, were there with her Leica and a wide-angle lens; in her absence, he had to do the

best he could on his own.

At one end of the tomb was a simple inscription:

‘ROGER SOUTHWELL. DY•D 1697 A.D.’

Southwell again. Where had he heard that name before? Clockwise from this, seven panels told a story:

three on each side and one at the far end. All were surrounded by illustrations and motifs in smaller panels

forming friezes and borders. There was too much to assimilate quickly.

Alan stood up too fast, his head suddenly spinning. The sound of the bells still crowded the air, not allow-

ing any other sound in; looking at his watch he saw that some twenty minutes remained of their hour at All

Saints. He squatted down again.

The carvings were both intricate and surprisingly well-preserved considering they had been braving wind,

rain and snow since 1697. Alan ran his fingers over the first panel, finding the stone was strangely smooth to

his touch. Then he examined the picture it presented.

The protagonist - Roger Southwell, presumably - appeared to be a scholar, or perhaps a magician, since

the surrounding carvings were of cabalistic-looking symbols.

In this first picture Southwell, if it was he, was lifting a book inscribed LIBER ARCANI from a hiding-

place. Alan copied the Latin words into his notebook, followed by ‘Man finding book’. He knew that liber

meant book, but his Latin O-level lay too far in the past for much more than that.

The second picture showed the same man studying the book which he had found. That he was reading of

treasure was implied by a frieze of crowns and coins, but strange creatures crawled among them - beasts of

fearsome aspect. Alan wrote ‘Man reading about treasure(?)’ after copying the inscription, and this impres-

sion was borne out by the third frame, which showed the man digging beneath a tree of no identifiable species.

Instead of leaves, tiny birds and bats filled its branches; closer inspection showed the bark to be made up of

serpents. Spiders and flies and crawling things abounded in the images surrounding this picture.

‘Man digging for treasure,’ Alan captioned it.

‘Alan!’ called someone, startling him.

Realising he must be invisible, crouched down as he was, Alan stood up and waved:

‘Over here.’

‘We’re going to have lunch in the pub.’

‘Which one?’

‘There’s only one. That-a-way. King’s Head, or-Arms, or something. Some bit of a king, anyway.

‘King’s Buttocks?’ suggested Alan.

‘Probably.’

‘I’ll see you there in a minute. Don’t drink all the beer,’ Alan called, his attention returning to the drama

in the story’s fourth frame.

Here something had burst from the ground and was clutching the treasure-hunter in a horrid parody of an

embrace. The creature seemed to have no proper shape, but it had claws, and teeth - with which it appeared

to be gnawing its victim’s face. Its fur was cleverly carved: conveying the impression of a nature both oily

and unclean. Around this picture the images were unequivocal - demons fanged and clawed, and skeletal

Death’s naked bones and clenched smile.

‘Monster attacks R.S.’ wrote Alan laconically, and moved round the tomb to see what happened next.

As if some Pandora’s box had opened, horrors poured up out of the earth. Here the artist appeared to have

been strongly influenced by Hieronymous Bosch, and a shiver crawled suddenly across Alan’s shoulders. He

did not linger, noting merely ‘Monsters on rampage.’

So involved was he with the story that it was with some relief he saw Good vanquishing Evil in the next

frame. The panel was filled with saints, all grim of countenance, with their clear eyes focused on the centre,

where cowered the killing beast.

‘Saints Overcome Monster,’ wrote Alan, like a tabloid sub-editor. ‘Gotcha,’ he thought, recalling a

favourite headline.

The seventh and final frame showed the saints again - ‘All Saints,’Alan realised, belatedly recalling the

church’s dedication - but now they were binding the creature: not in chains but in garlands, garlands of elder

and rowan, oak and ash, and other leaves he could not identify.

‘Green Party ties up the monster,’ he wrote flippantly.

And that was it; full circle. He was back at the inscription.

‘DY•D 1697 A.D.’

Was this a real legend of Roger Southwell’s death, or a serious allegory of some sort - a warning against

meddling with the supernatural? Or simply a conventional caution against avarice?

Wishing for more information, he squinted again at the carved letters. Some strange impulse drew his

attention to the base of the panel, and pushing the grass down with his hand, he found a further inscription -

a line of deeply graven characters. But they were merely a meaningless jumble of letters. Alan frowned, but

wrote them down anyway, then headed for the pub to join the others.

***

What with another pub visit at the end of the day, then a long drive back, followed by a chicken tikka with

some of the other ringers, it was nearly midnight when Alan finally got home. He decided to go straight to

bed, since Kim was away on location until mid-week.

Although they had met in a ringing-chamber, she had little time to pursue that hobby these days; which

was a pity, as she had always been keener, and better, than Alan. Her being musical had a lot to do with it, he

felt, as music is kin to mathematics and mathematicians often make accomplished ringers.

In the morning, after breakfast, he put Verdi’s Otello on the stereo and headed for his bookshelves. The

first thing he looked up was the village, and here he struck gold at once:

‘Fenstanton: Fenstanton Abbey (ruined). A house built c.1660 for Roger Southwell,

reputedly a magician. It stood empty for some years after his death in 1697 and has never

been occupied for any length of time; around 1800 it was described as “derelict”. Southwell

himself lies buried in an interesting tomb outside the churchyard of the redundant church

of All Saints, reputedly because he was excommunicated for wizardly activities.’

Confident that further research would yield more information about Southwell, Alan took his notepad from

his pocket and looked at what he had written the previous day.

LIBER ARCANI. Secret book, presumably. Or - book of secrets? He wrote ‘The book of hidden things’.

HIC DIVITIÆ LEGET. ‘Here reads (he reads?)’ What was ‘divitiæ’?

Putting down his pen, Alan went to hunt for his old Latin dictionary. Eventually he found it in the glory-

hole under the stairs, sandwiched between a hymnbook stamped in purple ink ‘Priory Grammar School. Do

not remove’ and a 1960 Ford Anglia manual.

‘Here he reads of riches,’ he wrote a moment later, and eventually, with the help of the dictionary, he trans-

lated the captions to all the frames.

The others read: They have set a guardian (he knew ‘custodia’); The reward of avarice; The power of

God’s holy saints; and finished with something Alan vaguely thought was a quotation: ‘Auri sacra fames’,

accursed hunger for gold.

And now, he thought, what about that strange string of letters? Looking at them anew, Alan was certain

they constituted a cipher, but how to break it?

GZNUZNZLPVTOVLFOGUHLSGZDVSMRMVWG

The first thing he noticed now was the frequency of Gs and Zs, one of which must presumably stand for

E, the commonest letter in the English language.

Alan sighed, stood up, fetched a beer from the fridge, and stared out of the window for a while. There was

no easy solution to the code: that was plain. Also, it was Sunday, so libraries were shut. Either he’d have to

try and solve it without help, or - wait.

Since waiting was out of the question: 5

‘Okay,’ said Alan to himself, ‘you’re a bright lad. You’ve been known to ring Stedman Triples. You can’t

let a little thing like a code bamboozle you.’

He turned up the stereo, fetched a garden chair from the shed and put it outside in the sun, then settled

down with paper and a pen.

Somewhere he’d seen codes grouped into equal numbers of letters - four or five. He added up the letters

and found thirty-two, so wrote them down in fours.

GZNU ZNZL PVTO VLFO GUHL SGZD VSMR MVWG

They looked more manageable like that, anyway.

All right. There were four Gs, four Zs, and four Vs as well, so maybe these stood for E, T, and A, the com-

monest letters in English. He played around with this possibility for a frustrating half-hour, convinced that Z

stood for A, simply because of the juxtaposition:

TANU ANALPETO ELFO TUHL STAD ESMR MEWT

Something he’d read stirred in his memory then, and he rearranged the letters, taking the first of each

group, and then the second, and so on.

TAPE TSEM ANELUTSENATF HAMW ULOO LDRT

Now he had to guess. The two TSE combinations were almost certainly THE, but that didn’t help much.

There were two Os together, and Ls round them, and another L, which made three. Whatever came after E, T,

and Aas fourth commonest letter? Try O, Alan thought, and got:

TAPE THE MANE OUTHE NATFH AMW OOOODRT

Which was nearer to making sense, it seemed. And yet, far from solution.

‘Bugger this,’ thought Alan, and stared morosely down the garden. In the background, Luciano Pavarotti

was lamenting the loss of Otello’s peace of mind. ‘Ora e per sempre addio, sante memorie, addio sublimi

incanti del pensier,’ he sang. ‘Now and forever farewell, sacred memories, farewell, sublime enchantments of

the mind...’ As always, it raised the small hairs at the back of Alan’s neck.

Then something occurred to him, like a lightbulb over Goofy’s head:

A B C D E then F G H

Z Y X W V ... U T S

It was a backward substitution! Quickly he scribbled out the rest of the alphabet, and came up with:

TAKE THE NAME OF THE MAGUS AND FOLLOW IT

And what the hell was that supposed to mean? he asked himself.

The name of the magus. Roger Southwell. Alan laughed suddenly. The answer had sprung off the page, a

clue by a seventeenth century cruciverbalist:

South. Well.

He’d bet a hundred pounds that there was, or had been, a well in the grounds of Fenstanton Abbey - and

he recalled, with a shudder, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.

As to what was in the Fenstanton well - ‘Well,’ thought Alan, ‘only one way to find out.’

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摘要：

ThePrinter’sDevilbyChicoKiddChicoKidd113ClyffordRoadRuislipGardensMiddlesexHA46PXEnglandTel./Fax01895677410e-mail:chico@nildram.co.ukwebsite:http://www.chico.nildram.co.ukContentsChapterPage1AWarningtotheCurious12CavernsMeasurelesstoMan73PapersI:TheMaiden134AWearinessoftheFlesh265RenownedbethyGrave3...

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