“He does give us the newspapers free, though, Sergeant,” said Newt. “And they're not too old.”
“And voodoo. I bet he does voodoo. Sacrificing chickens to that Baron Saturday. Ye know, tall darkie bugger in the top hat. Brings people back from the dead, aye, and makes them work on the Sabbath day. Voodoo.” Shadwell sniffed speculatively.
Newt tried to picture Shadwell's landlord as an exponent of voodoo. Certainly Mr. Rajit worked on the Sabbath. In fact, with his plump quiet wife and plump cheerful children he worked around the clock, never mind the calendar, diligently filling the area's needs in the matter of soft drinks, white bread, tobacco, sweets, newspapers, magazines, and the type of top.. shelf pornography that made Newt's eyes water just to think about. The worst you could imagine Mr. Rajit doing with a chicken was selling it after the “Sell.. By” date.
“But Mister Rajit's from Bangladesh, or India, or somewhere,” he said. “I thought voodoo came from the West Indies.”
“Ah,” said Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell, and took another drag on his cigarette. Or appeared to. Newt had never actually quite seen one of his superior's cigarettes.. it was something to do with the way he cupped his hands. He even made the ends disappear when he'd finished with them. “Ah.”
“Well, doesn't it?”
“Hidden wisdom, lad. Inner mili'try secrets of the Witchfinder army. When you're all initiated proper ye'll know the secret truth. Some voodoo may come from the West Indies. I'll grant ye that. Oh yes, I'll grant ye that. But the worst kind. The darkest kind, that comes from, um ...”
“Bangladesh?”
“Errrukh! Yes lad, that's it. Words right out of me mouth. Bangladesh. Exactly.”
Shadwell made the end of his cigarette vanish, and managed furtively to roll another, never letting papers or tobacco be seen.
“So. Ye got anything, Witchfinder Private?”
“Well, there's this.” Newton held out the clipping.
Shadwell squinted at it. “Oh them, ” he said. “Load o' rubbish. Call themselves bloody witches? I checked them out last year. Went down with me armory of righteousness and a packet of firelighters, jemmied the place open, they were clean as a whistle. Mail order bee jelly business they're trying to pep up. Load o' rubbish. Wouldn't know a familiar spirit if it chewed out the bottoms o' their trousers. Rubbish. It's not like it used to be, laddie.”
He sat down and poured himself a cup of sweet tea from a filthy thermos.
“Did I ever tell you how I was recruited to the army?” he asked.
Newt took this as his cue to sit down. He shook his head. Shadwell lit his roll.. up with a battered Ronson lighter, and coughed appreciatively.
“My cellmate, he was. Witchfinder Captain Ffolkes. Ten years for arson. Burning a coven in Wimbledon. Would have got them all too, if it wasn't the wrong day. Good fellow. Told me about the battle.. the great war between Heaven and Hell ... It was him that told me the Inner Secrets of the Witchfinder Army. Familiar spirits. Nipples. All that ...”
“Knew he was dying, you see. Got to have someone to carry on the tradition. Like you is, now ...” He shook his head.
“That's what we'm reduced to, lad,” he said. “A few hundred years ago, see, we was powerful. We stood between the world and the darkness. We was the thin red line. Thin red line o' fire, ye see.”
“I thought the churches ...” Newt began.
“Pah!” said Shadwell. Newt had seen the word in print, but this was the first time he'd ever heard anyone say it. “Churches? What good did they ever do? They'm just as bad. Same line o' business, nearly. You can't trust them to stamp out the Evil One, 'cos if they did, they'd be out o' that line o' business. If yer goin' up against a tiger, ye don't want fellow travellers whose idea of huntin' is tae throw meat at it. Nay, lad. It's up to us. Against the darkness.”
Everything went quiet for a moment.
Newt always tried to see the best in everyone, but it had occurred to him shortly after joining the WA that his superior and only fellow soldier was as well balanced as an upturned pyramid. “Shortly,” in this case, meant under five seconds. The WA's headquarters was a fetid room with walls the color of nicotine, which was almost certainly what they were coated with, and a floor the color of cigarette ash, which was almost certainly what it was. There was a small square of carpet. Newt avoided walking on it if possible, because it sucked at his shoes.
One of the walls had a yellowing map of the British Isles tacked to it, with homemade flags sticking in it here and there; most of them were within a Cheap Day Return fare of London.
But Newt had stuck with it the past few weeks because, well, horrified fascination had turned into horrified pity and then a sort of horrified affection. Shadwell had turned out to be about five feet high and wore clothes which, no matter what they actually were, always turned up even in your short.. term memory as an old mackintosh. The old man may have had all his own teeth, but only because no one else could possibly have wanted them; just one of them, placed under the pillow, would have made the Tooth Fairy hand in its wand.