The Book of Doom - By Barry Hutchison Page 0,65

of the lot. There was something different about him too. Something about the way he stood that said he was someone you really ought to be paying attention to. The smallest demon fired off a perfect salute as the newcomer stepped over him.

The stench of death and burning flesh caught at the back of Zac’s throat as the demon stopped in front of him. “This is them?” the monster demanded.

“Yeah, that’s them, Mr Haures, sir,” nodded the little one. “Told you we’d catch ’em. It was Toxie here what did—”

Haures clicked his scaly fingers. There was a brief scream and the little demon vanished in a plume of angry flame. “Shut up,” said Haures absent-mindedly.

The big demon looked down at Murmur asleep on the floor, and shook his head in annoyance. He turned his gaze on both boys. His lips drew back into an approximation of a smile. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he told them. “I’ve been waiting for you for a long, long time.”

“Wh-who are you?” Angelo stammered.

Haures fixed him with a fiery stare. He said nothing for a while, as if contemplating the question.

“You will find out soon enough,” he said at last. Turning away, he motioned to the larger members of the demon group. “Take them down to ten,” he instructed. “Carefully. Anyone harms them and they will answer to me.”

The other demons nodded hastily, bowing low as Haures swept past. There was a collective sigh of relief from them as he vanished into thin air. A moment later, he reappeared again.

“Oh, and notify the Master,” he ordered. “He will want to see these insects for himself.”

“Watch who you’re calling an insect,” Zac warned.

With a twitch of irritation, Haures snapped his fingers again. Something went pop inside Zac’s head. He felt his ankles wobble, then his knees buckle. He probably felt the floor as he crashed down on to it, but he couldn’t say for sure. Zac’s eyes closed. The voices of the demons and the screams of Angelo sounded far away along a tunnel.

The last thing he heard before he surrendered to unconsciousness was the mad barking of the flea-bitten cat.

A jet of water woke him up. It was warm and smelled unpleasantly sour. He really hoped that it was water, but he had his doubts.

Spluttering, he looked up. A hunchbacked creature with too few eyes and too many teeth leered as it squirted murky yellow liquid at him from a plastic bottle. “He’s awake,” the demon said, in a surprisingly feminine voice.

She gave the bottle another squeeze, spraying Zac with more of the copper-coloured liquid. He tried to make a grab for it, but discovered his hands were shackled to a steel frame above his head. He tried to move his feet, but thick chains held those in place too.

He heard a whimper from his right and saw that Angelo was chained up exactly as he was. The boy’s eyes were closed, but his head was moving, as if he were just waking up too.

Zac quickly glanced around the room, trying to get his bearings, but he was somewhere he had never seen before. The room was a stark, clinical white, with stainless steel worktops lining the walls on every side. There were no windows that he could see, and no doors, either. No way in or out.

A chair stood in the middle of the room, like something from a dentist’s surgery – reclined fully back with a movable spotlight mounted above it. Zac wished he hadn’t spotted the straps and buckles on the armrests, but they were the first things he had seen.

“Thank you, Eliza, that will be all.”

A man just a little taller than Angelo stepped into view. He appeared human, more or less, with only two sawn-off stumps of what must once have been horns to suggest his true nature.

The man looked to be in his late sixties, with thinning grey hair and deep-set wrinkles. He was dressed in a black suit, which may originally have been tailor-made, but which now looked a size or two on the large side. His rumpled shirt was also black. He wore the top button open, with a blood-red tie hanging loosely round his neck.

His eyes were hidden behind a pair of designer sunglasses. He had rings on almost every finger and a gold watch on his wrist that was tarnished and scuffed. The man stared back at Zac and took a long, deep draw on a cigarette.

“Who are you supposed to be?” Zac asked.

There