The Unlucky Man by H T G Hedges Page A

gaps in the ceiling here, dripping and burbling steadily onto the mossy carpet with its flowering of cupped brown mushrooms. The smell up here was even headier than it had been below, thickly cloying and choking. I tried not to think about spores flooding my nostrils.
    And then, at last, we were through another door and into a large, open chamber decorated with an opulence so out of keeping with the rest of the building it was disconcerting. Thick rugs adorned the floorboards, colourful and expensively decorated; oriental hangings lined the walls whilst thick incense floated in the air, keeping the stink beyond the door mostly, if not entirely, at bay.
    A figure was seated at a huge, dark wood desk that curved majestically into the centre of the room, a glass decanter atop it filled with amber spirit.
    "Mr. Happen," Baldman said with deference and a strange almost half bow to the figure behind the desk before retreating to stand in the shadows behind him. I was pleased to see him remove his ridiculous sunglasses as he did so.
    So this was the Make It Happen Man. He was not at all what I had expected.
    He was a tall, gaunt figure, old but in no way diminished by age. Thick white curls rolled back from his brow, flowing above a face of weathered and thickly lined leather skin. His was not a kindly old face, however, but rather the unyielding countenance of a feared and respected teacher. Old ink showed on his skeletal fingers and across the backs of his hands, faded sigils and angled characters in a spreading blue green that may once have been black.
    But it was his eyes that surprised me the most: one dark as oil, the other rheumy and white and surely blind, peeking like a marble from beneath a scarred and puckered lid. He smiled very slightly at Corg, a glint of sharp gold teeth catching the light cast by the oil lamp on the mammoth desk.
    His voice, when he spoke, was deep and resonant, at odds with his advancing years. "Alexander," he said, "It has been some time." He raised a hand in a vague gesture taking in the room around us.
    "Please excuse the mess, but we find ourselves living in interesting times." He grinned a big, predatory golden grin, picking up a heavy based tumbler and swirling the liquid within. "And to what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?" He inflected the final word with enough venom to make it plain that we were far from welcome in his rotten castle. Behind him I caught Baldman’s smirk.
    Corg spread his hands in an imploring gesture.
    "We’re in trouble Mr. Happen," he said earnestly, "We could use a place to lay our hats for a while, whilst the storm dies down." His words sounded small, muffled and swallowed by the thickly scented hostile air.
    "So it is charity you would ask from me Alexander?" He murmured. "Until, as you say, the storm dies down." Happen’s measured facade twitched with an emotion I couldn’t read.
    "But it isn’t going to die down," he said, a strange glint in his one good eye, a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all playing at his lips. "The storm is here to stay." He sipped from his glass, a small amount of liquid escaping to roll down his lined and whiskered chin. "We are at war Alexander," he said, "Lines have been drawn in the sand. We have larger considerations now." He leaned forwards in his seat, leather creaking under his shifting weight.
    "You know," he said with the air of one sharing a secret, "I wasn’t even going to let you come here. It’s only for Loess’ sake that you’re here at all. She fought your corner valiantly you know, said that we owed it to you for the risks you have taken in the past. She says we owe it to you to trust you, but trust is a commodity with which I recently find myself in short supply." His mismatched eyes flashed dangerously in the reflected gas-light.
    "But it is strange, I feel, that you choose this day to come knocking unannounced at my door." He cut his glance towards me and the temperature in the room seemed to plummet.