by Holt, Tom
‘You know where we’re going, then?’
She nodded. ‘Glad I decided to come now, aren’t you? Don’t worry, nothing to be afraid of. Not if I’m with you.’
Really, Paul thought. ‘According to the timetable, if we catch a 37A to—’
She hit his arm playfully. He was proud of how he managed to stifle the shriek of pain. ‘No buses when you’re with me, silly,’ she said. ‘I never go on buses. No privacy.’ She whistled and held up her hand. At once, a taxi appeared. Paul wasn’t sure, but as he climbed in he reckoned he caught a glimpse of round red eyes in the driver’s compartment.
He shuffled along the seat, trying to keep away from Mr Tanner’s mum’s legs, which seemed to fill all available space. ‘Aren’t you cold, dressed like that?’ he asked sourly.
‘Me? Nah.’ She twitched her nose at him. ‘Think about it. I’m covered from head to foot with thick black fur, it’s just that you can’t see it under the monkey suit.’
Paul made a point of looking out of the window. ‘I wanted to ask about that,’ he said. ‘How you do it, I mean,’ he added quickly, before she could make anything of it. ‘Is it, like, effective magic? What the Countess does, I mean?’
She laughed. ‘Not likely,’ she said. ‘That’s Fey stuff. Our lot don’t hold with that. Fact is, we reckon it’s unethical.’
‘Unethical?’ Paul nearly choked. ‘That’s a bit rich, isn’t it, coming from—?’
‘Don’t be nasty,’ Mr Tanner’s mum interrupted. ‘As it happens, we have a complex and highly developed tradition of moral philosophy. You may think that to us, ethics is a south-eastern English county pronounced with a lisp, but that says more about you than us, if you ask me. But that’s all right,’ she added, her voice softening. ‘You don’t know any better, so I forgive you.’ Paul felt something scarily handlike on his knee, and shifted in his seat. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘to answer your question, no, we don’t do effective magic. When she shift shapes, we shift shapes, it’s not just – what is it Judy calls it? – trompe l’æil. If you were to cut me open with a knife right now, I’d be solid ape-derivative down to the bone. Just furrier than most, that’s all.’
Paul hadn’t realised that Bermondsey was such a long drive from the City, though it was possible that something akin to effective magic was interfering with his perception of time. He was, however, extremely grateful when the taxi eventually stopped.
Skivers Walk turned out to be old brown brick, dusty windows and flaking paint; bad camouflage, he couldn’t help thinking. If you wanted to hide paranormal activity in modern London, you’d do better with concrete, steel and smoked glass. Maybe they were into Victoriana, or just liked it the way it was. ‘Are we here?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘We want Number Five,’ she said. ‘It’s round the side, down a little sort of alley. I keep telling them it’s too Harry Potter for words, but they won’t listen. They’ve actually got a notice on the door saying No Callers, would you believe? Might as well have a sign saying Suspicious building this way, folks in flashing green neon. Still, nobody ever said that the little buggers were any too bright.’
Paul knocked and waited. Then Mr Tanner’s mum shoved him out of the way and knocked, and they waited. Then they both tried knocking again, and Mr Tanner’s mum produced a spike-poll tomahawk from inside her dress and chopped a large splinter out of the door. Then they waited some more.
‘It’s all right,’ she told him, ‘they’re always like this. Shy.’ She clouted the door hard with the side of her boot, making it shake.
‘Would you mind putting that away?’ Paul muttered, nodding towards the axe in her hand. ‘Before someone sees.’
‘Fusspot.’ The tomahawk vanished from between her fingers. ‘Actually, you could set off a bomb on the doorstep and nobody’d take any notice. Glamour, you see. I guess that’s how they get away with the bloody stupid decor.’
She clumped the door ferociously with her balled fists, threw back her head and howled like a wolf. Ten seconds later, the door opened on a chain.
‘Oh,’ said a voice. ‘It’s you.’
Mr Tanner’s mum scowled at the crack between door and frame. ‘Let us in, you pillock, or I’ll introduce you to my friend here. You want that?’
The door swung open as though blown out by an explosion. ‘Get in,’ snapped the voice. ‘And please don’t threaten me again. You know it upsets me.’
Paul stepped in quickly, before the voice could change its mind. The building he found himself standing in seemed vaguely familiar, though he knew for a fact he’d never been there in his life before. Then he figured it out. It was exactly like the warehouse locations they were so fond of using in 1970s cop shows, where Bodie and Doyle shoot it out with the evil masked terrorists. Everything was just so, from the patches of white mould on the bare brick walls to the rusty chains dangling from rickety catwalks overhead. And thus, of course, entirely unconvincing.
‘Shhh,’ warned the door-opener. ‘They’re all asleep.’
Paul looked at him. He was short, middle-aged, glasses, thinning on top, in a brown warehouse coat with biros in the top pocket. The only thing about his appearance that Paul was prepared to believe in was the look of fear and disgust on his face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he began. ‘I’m from J.W. Wells, I’m here to ask you if you’d be prepared to help us out with a job we’re—’
The man stared at him through his quarter-inch-thick lenses. ‘You don’t want to buy anything, then.’
‘No. Sorry.’
The tension in the man’s face reduced considerably. ‘That’s all right, then, though you could’ve said so earlier. You had me worried there for a minute.’
Paul thought about that. ‘You don’t want people to buy anything?’ he asked.
The man shuddered. Over his shoulder, in the vast gloom of the warehouse interior, Paul could see row upon row of wooden packing cases, piled on top of each other a dozen high. ‘Too right,’ the man said.
‘Oh. Then why—?’
‘Bastards,’ the man cut in savagely. ‘They turn up on the doorstep without a by-your-leave, hammer on the door, won’t go away, and then they want to buy stuff. And they phone,’ he added bitterly, ‘and send faxes. If it was up to me I’d hang the lot of ’em.’
As if on cue, a distant telephone started to ring. The man swung round, yelled ‘Shut up!’ at the top of his voice, and wiped his hands nervously on the front of his coat. ‘It rings for bloody ages sometimes,’ he said, ‘minutes at a time. You’d think they had something better to do, wouldn’t you?’ He shook himself like a dog, then walked away briskly. ‘Come on, then, if you’re coming,’ he called back after them. ‘And for pity’s sake don’t make a noise. They won’t thank you for waking them up, you know.’
Mr Tanner’s mum’s four-inch stilettos made a noise like Fred and Ginger working out on a rickety iron bridge; but it was Paul who got shushed when he tripped over a cardboard box on the floor. ‘Who are they?’ he hissed at Mr Tanner’s mum, as the man opened a door in the wall and passed through.
‘You mean you—? I thought Judy’d have told you.’
‘Well no, she didn’t. Who—?’
‘Shhh.’
‘Don’t you start.’
It was dark in the room that they’d been ushered into, dark enough to give Paul a nasty pain in the memory. Happily, the man turned on the light.
‘Should be all right,’ he said. ‘This is the office, nobody comes in here.’
Paul could see why. There was probably a desk, under all that paper; hardly surprising if there turned out to be a seam of coal, too. The floor was similarly elusive under a crust of old envelopes, crumpled newspaper, plastic sandwich boxes and old brown paper bags spotted with mouse droppings. There was a chair that nobody would ever want to sit in, under any circumstances.
‘Right,’ the man said. ‘You sure you don’t want to buy anything?’
‘Positive,’ Paul said, with feeling.
The man glanc
ed at him, frowned, and gave him the benefit of the doubt. ‘I had to ask,’ he said. ‘We had four of them in here the other week. One of them,’ he added with a shudder that started at his toes, ‘asked to see a catalogue. Just as well it was me here that day – I can take it. What’s she doing here, anyway?’
‘Just being friendly,’ Mr Tanner’s mum said. The man made a soft spluttering noise and looked away.
Paul took a deep breath. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘two – no, sorry, three of our people are sort of trapped in this dungeon.’ The man nodded; his manner had changed when Paul said trapped and dungeon, as though the horrible weird interlude was finally over and they’d got back to the real world. ‘Apparently it’s something to do with the Fey—’
Now the man was scowling, as if Paul had offended him in some way. ‘Oh yes?’
‘That’s what I was told. Grendel’s Aunt, if that means anything to—’
‘Oh, yes.’ Now he was unoffended again, businesslike, sympathetic. ‘And you want them got out of there.’
‘Well, yes. If that’s all right, I mean.’
‘Of course it is.’ The man took a biro from his top pocket and pulled the cap off with his teeth as he reached for a piece of paper with his other hand. ‘Go on.’
‘That’s all I know about it, really,’ Paul said. ‘I was in there with them for a bit, but I didn’t really get a good look at where I was or anything.’
The man looked up sharply. ‘You were in the dungeon,’ he said, ‘and you got out?’
‘I got him out,’ Mr Tanner’s mum put in.
‘Oh.’ The man appeared to lose interest. ‘Well, we’ll see what we can do for you. Let’s have some details.’
Paul nodded. ‘Okay. Probably best if I start with some names—’
The man winced as if Paul had burned him. ‘Bloody hell,’ he snapped at Mr Tanner’s mum, ‘didn’t you tell him? You should’ve told him before you brought him here.’
She pulled a remorseful face. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Only, when he starts chattering away it’s a job to make him shut up. No names,’ she said to Paul, all schoolteacherish. ‘They don’t like them, it’s not the done thing. Perhaps you’d better leave this to me.’
Paul ignored her. ‘Just a second,’ he said. ‘Why no names?’
‘Allergic,’ the man muttered. ‘Tell him to stop, will you, for—’
‘Did you threaten to kill me the other day?’
‘Threaten?’ The man looked blank. ‘What do you take me for?’
‘Answer the question.’
‘Are you accusing me of something, or what?’
Paul breathed out through his nose. ‘Answer the question,’ he repeated. ‘With a statement,’ he added. ‘Please.’
The man glanced nervously at Mr Tanner’s mum, then said, ‘No. Satisfied?’
Hardly, Paul thought; but verbal bludgeoning wasn’t his style, just as dormice very rarely pull down full-grown elephants. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Only I was talking to someone just the other day, and this business about being allergic to names cropped up. So I wondered, that’s all.’
The man opened his mouth, but Mr Tanner’s mum beat him to it. ‘It’s not important,’ she said firmly. ‘Just trust me, all right? It’s no big deal.’
That was disconcerting, to say the least; because, in all matters not involving personal relationships and garment removal, Paul realised that he did trust her. He had no idea why. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘So, what do you want to know?’
The man was still quivering slightly, but he seemed relatively coherent. ‘You say you’ve got three people needing rescuing from the dungeons. Humans?’
‘Well, of course they’re—’ Paul thought about it. ‘Well, no,’ he amended. ‘One’s a dwarf, and another one’s a car. Is now, I mean; she used to be human.’
That didn’t bother the man one bit. ‘Right,’ he said, making notes on the back of an envelope. ‘One human, one dwarf, one—’ He looked up and grinned suddenly. ‘One convertible. How long have they been there, do you know?’
Paul glanced at his watch and figured out the time, to the nearest half-hour. ‘God only knows what sort of a state they’re in by now,’ he added. ‘I was only in there a few minutes, and I was about ready to crack up.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ the man said, with actual sympathy. ‘You’re not the first, won’t be the last. And we’ll see what we can do about your friends,’ he added. ‘Not promising anything, mind, but we’ll see how we go.’
Paul nodded. He wasn’t reassured and he didn’t feel better, but at least something had been done, or was about to be done, or might get done at some indeterminate point in the future. ‘Is there anything else?’ he asked. Suddenly he wanted to be back in his nice safe office.
‘I can get you a cup of tea if you like,’ the man said, but Mr Tanner’s mum shot him a vicious scowl. ‘Just being polite,’ he grumbled, ‘that’s all.’
‘I think we’d better be getting back,’ Paul said, nodding to Mr Tanner’s mum. ‘I don’t suppose your friend’s going to want to stay on reception all day.’
‘My great-aunt, actually, and yes, she would. Some days you need to prise her out of there with a crowbar.’
They tiptoed back out the way they’d come in, the man poking his head round the door and looking both ways before he let them past into the main warehouse. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ he said as he shooed them into the street. ‘Please don’t phone.’ Then he slammed the door hard, and they stood listening to bolts shooting home and locks graunching for about thirty seconds. ‘Actually, they’re all right once you get to know them,’ Mr Tanner’s mum said, as she flagged down a taxi. ‘At least, if you can learn to cope with us, they’re not a whole lot worse.’
It was only as the taxi pulled away, and Paul shuffled out of reach of an absently straying hand, that he remembered something he’d seen propped against the warehouse wall, glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. A rickety, shabby, dusty old Raleigh bicycle.
When Paul got home there was a letter waiting for him on the mat. Sure, Paul got letters. Several public companies and government bodies wrote to him at least four times a year, and the bank seemed almost pathetically keen to keep in touch. Letters from people, on the other hand, weren’t particularly common. What made this one stand out, however, was the American stamp and the handwriting on the envelope.
Dear Paul, it said;
Well, the weather here is very nice and your father and I are having a good time. The neighbours are friendly and there are some nice shops. We have bought a big trailer so we can go touring in the fall. However, I am still having trouble with my feet. I am sorry to have to tell you that your Uncle Ernie died last week. I don’t suppose you remember him at all, you were quite small the last time he came to the house. The funeral will be in Ireland. I don’t suppose you’ll be able to get time off work to go.
His lawyers have written us that there’s a box of his stuff at their office. Dad and I don’t want anything particularly, so if you want to go and collect it, you can keep anything you want and welcome. The lawyers are quite handy for where you work, they are in Grays Inn Road. You could drop by on your lunch break. I enclose their card, and Dad has written on the back that you can have the box.
Hope you are well,
Mum
Paul picked up the card and looked at it: on one side the firm’s name, Messrs Swindall, Frettenham & Shark; on the other, his father’s heavy, blunt letters: Paul Carpenter is my son, he can have Ernie’s old junk as I don’t want it. D. Carpenter.
Christ, he thought.
It was, he reflected, the first time he’d ever inherited anything; and since Uncle Ernie only mattered to him because of the remote chance that he might be the Ernest Carpenter who’d written part of the chapter in the office-procedures manual, his death wasn’t a desperately harrowing event. The timing of his sudden windfall was something quite other, as spiky with implications as a hedgehog group hug. But his p
arents couldn’t be involved in JWW stuff, could they? And they wouldn’t lie to him, or anything like that.
No, Paul decided, he could be fairly sure they wouldn’t, in the normal course of things; since in order to lie, you must first communicate. He thought for a moment. He’d had a letter from his parents before – one, enclosing a note for him to pass on to the bank, cancelling his subsistence allowance when he’d got his job. It had been pleasant enough, but laconic to the point of terseness; there hadn’t been any of the gushing personal detail that his mother had crammed into this one. Another point he couldn’t help but notice was that his Mum’s writing style had changed rather, and some of the turns of phrase didn’t sound like her at all. He tried to analyse the differences, but the only one he could put his finger on was that when he was a kid, all her sentences tended to start with the word don’t. That, he admitted, could be accounted for by context. He put the card in his wallet and left the letter on the hall shelf, mostly covered by his library book but with one corner showing.
The woman who collected Paul from the waiting-room introduced herself as Mrs Leary. She was smart, brisk and moderately friendly, which made a pleasant change after a morning helping Christine move more filing cabinets.
‘I have to say I never met your – uncle, was it?’ she said over her shoulder, as Paul followed her across a savannah of deep, monogrammed beige carpet.
‘Great-uncle,’ he replied, ‘I think. My parents were always a bit vague. You know, everybody was uncle this or aunt that. Anyway, we weren’t close or anything like that.’
Mrs Leary took him to a small room with a plain desk and a wall full of prints of Great Nineteenth Century Judges; they gave the impression of having ended up there because there was nowhere else to banish them to, like the Picts. The box of Uncle Ernie’s effects was on the desk when he got there. A long time ago, it had contained tinned South African peaches.
‘That’s it,’ said Mrs Leary. ‘And here’s a note of our charges,’ she added, handing him a scary-looking envelope. ‘No need to bother with that now, next week will do fine.’
