by Holt, Tom
‘Do you know where Mr Wurmtoter’s got to?’ he asked the dazzling redhead behind the desk, only remembering at the last moment who she really was.
‘Not a clue,’ Mr Tanner’s mum said, with a click of the tongue. ‘Phone’s been going for him all bloody day,’ she added, holding up a thick wad of While-You-Were-Out notes. ‘What happened to you, by the way? Cut yourself shaving, or is that ketchup from a leaky burger?’
Paul sighed. ‘None of your business,’ he snapped. Then he remembered something else. ‘While I’m here,’ he said, as casually as he could manage. ‘You remember that cardboard box full of junk I got from my uncle a while back? You said you’d look after it for me.’
Her eyes widened slightly; today they were emerald green and very round and deep. ‘Vaguely,’ she said. ‘What about it?’
‘I’d rather like it back, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Why?’ Her mouth tightened a little. ‘I thought I told you, that stuff’s nasty, not to be played with.’
‘Oh, I just wanted to look at it,’ Paul said. ‘No big deal. I’ll give it back as soon as I’m done with it, if it means so much to you.’
Mr Tanner’s mum sniffed. ‘No need to get all snotty with me,’ she said, ‘It’s for your own good, you ungrateful little toad. You haven’t got a clue how to handle stuff like that, and I’m buggered if I’m rescuing you if you get yourself stuck in a Probability Mine or a Butterfield Anomaly.’
Oh, Paul thought. ‘That’s not likely, is it?’
She snickered. ‘That’s serious kit you’ve got there,’ she said. ‘A bit advanced for you. It’d be like handing a chainsaw to a ten-year-old.’
‘I’m not planning on using it,’ Paul said, and managed not to add honest. ‘I just wanted to check something out, that’s all.’
‘Please yourself.’ She opened her mouth, inserted a finger and hooked out what looked like a small lump of chewing gum. ‘Only don’t blame me,’ she added, as she laid it in the middle of her palm and blew on it gently. As it slowly began to grow, she put it down on the desk. Thirty seconds later, it had turned back into the cardboard box, albeit slightly moist and sticky with spit.
‘Thanks,’ Paul muttered, trying to find a dry bit to catch hold of. ‘Really, I appreciate you looking after it for me. I hope it, um, didn’t taste too bad.’
Mr Tanner’s mum grinned. ‘A bit like chicken,’ she said. ‘Joke,’ she added. ‘Actually, more like strawberries. Never could be doing with strawberries, mind. In fact, most fruit gives me heartburn. Natural carnivore, see.’
Change of plan. Instead of continuing his search for Mr Wurmtoter, Paul headed back to his office with the box. When he got there, he found that the threatened aerial photographs had already arrived: mile upon mile of identical treetops in black and white, like an Impressionist still life of a ball of wire wool. He put them carefully on one side so that the spitty box wouldn’t mark them.
Inside, just as he’d left them, was Uncle Ernie’s supernatural junk collection: the busted watch, the screwdriver, the library ticket, the pen and the box of chalks. Burn them, he recalled Uncle Ernie saying; that was the chalks, wasn’t it? He took them out and slid the lid open. They looked, felt and smelled like your basic schoolroom standard issue. How did you go about burning chalk, anyhow? He shook his head and stowed them, along with the rest of the garbage, in his jacket pocket. In doing so, he found the little glassy stone.
Funny, Paul thought; it didn’t seem important any more. He put it down on the desk for a moment while he dumped the cardboard box on the floor in the corner, where he wouldn’t trip over it. When he turned back, he noticed that the stone was resting on top of the pile of photographs – and it was glowing faintly.
Mildly curious, Paul picked it up. It felt very slightly warm, but the light inside it was fading rapidly. He put it back on the photo, but the light guttered and went out. Just for the hell of it, he moved it around on the glossy surface of the print, running it up and down systematically, like a scanner. On the fourth pass it started glowing again, and Paul felt the familiar tingling sensation that meant he’d dowsed some bauxite. Automatically he got a marker pen from his drawer and drew a circle round the relevant spot. Then he took a long, considered look at the stone.
After he’d been staring at it for a second or two, it seemed to change. Now it was like looking through a telescope; no, more like a zoom lens, because through it he could see the treetops getting closer, until he could make out first branches, then twigs, then individual leaves. Now he was down below the canopy, zooming in on undergrowth, ferns, topsoil; now he was under the ground, rushing past stones and roots, until he came to a layer of clay, followed by a stratum of rock. That, apparently, was the end of the line; just rock—
Paul sat up straight. Not just rock. Bauxite. Needless to say, he wouldn’t know bauxite if he got it in a sandwich with onion rings and Branston pickle; nevertheless, he recognised it, because the stone knew what it was, and knew it was what he was looking for. Something useful, Mr Tanner’s mum had said; and bauxite was useful stuff, surely, or else why did people bother digging it up out of the ground?
Well, he thought; pretty cool trick, but actually I don’t need the stone to do that, I’ve got this wonderful gift that means I can make lots of money for other people. He sat up, and in doing so caught sight of the stack of mouldy old photo albums he’d dumped on his bookshelf, the ones that had been in Uncle Ernie’s box, along with all the toys.
I wonder, Paul thought.
Well, no harm in trying. He took down an album at random and opened it at the beginning. Now he thought about it, he realised that he hadn’t actually looked in any of the albums himself; Mr Tanner’s mum had looked for him, to see if they were dangerous or booby-trapped. She’d said they were safe, just a lot of snapshots of ugly people, presumably his relatives. That had been enough to put Paul off looking for himself. Nearly all the worst hours of his pre-JWW life had been Sunday afternoons, spent at the house of some horrendous elderly female relation, with photo albums. He only had to see one, with its patterned cover and distinctive shiny pages, to tune out automatically. Sort of reverse catnip. It had never occurred to him that there might be anything in them worth spending time on. But he’d have said the same about a screwdriver or a broken watch—
Screwing the stone into his right eye like a jeweller’s loupe, Paul examined the first photo.
With both eyes open, he saw a group of glum-looking people gathered round a small plastic Christmas tree. If their appearance was anything to go by – Paul didn’t understand about women’s fashions, but he could recognise men’s flared trousers, fat ties, wide lapels and monster sideburns as the Mark of the Beast – the picture was thirty-odd years old. He didn’t recognise any of the faces.
When Paul shut his left eye, however, something very strange happened. It was a variation on the zoom-lens effect he’d encountered when he looked at the bauxite photo – he was swooping down from a great height towards a small table in the corner of the room, well away from the tree and the mob scene. Just when the vertigo was about to knock him silly, his point of view screeched to a jarring stop, and he realised he was looking at a scrap of paper lying on the table top. Now his viewpoint was closing in very slowly, and he could make out handwriting on the paper. A little further in, and he could read what it said—
Hello.
Well, that seemed friendly enough. It was just a scrap of paper in a photograph; maybe a note to say Gone out, your dinner’s in the oven; or, bearing in mind the context, a child’s thank-you letter. Paul read on:
I’m afraid I don’t know your name, mostly because you haven’t been born yet. I don’t even know if you’re my great-nephew or my great-niece. In fact, it’s possible you may be neither – in which case, Judy, it’s a pity nobody ever told you it’s rude to read other people’s letters.
But; assuming that Donny and Lynn – that’s them on the extreme right of the group – get married and have y
ou, welcome to the family. Now I doubt very much whether your parents will have told you about your pedigree – they don’t know yet themselves, and I’m in two minds about whether to tell them or not. My nephew Donny has many sterling qualities, I guess; for one thing, he’s mostly waterproof, and his fingernails grow pretty well, and he plays an adequate game of canasta. But he’s also loud, arrogant, stupid, bad-tempered and so far up himself he’s in danger of coming out of his own ear. I don’t know Lynn all that well yet, but I have my suspicions she’s mostly a waste of valuable resources, and the best that can be said of her is that she can use a knife and fork without putting anybody’s eye out. But there it is; you can’t choose your parents (I chose them for you; see below) and maybe you’ll turn out all right in the end: brave, clever, resourceful, caring and dedicated, like me. Stranger things have happened.
Anyhow, here we go. Our lot, the Carpenters, have had inherent supernatural abilities for at least thirty generations – a thousand years, give or take – and probably longer. I’m the only really outstanding supernatural practitioner we’ve produced, but over the years we’ve churned out competent sorcerers and magicians every other generation, and the trend would actually seem to be towards our abilities getting stronger as time goes on. Just think: if that’s true, you could turn out to be even better at this shit than I am.
Well, Paul thought, I’ll say this for him, he’s got the knack of fitting a long letter on a small bit of paper. That aside, though, I think I’ll reserve judgement.
Allow me to introduce myself, by the way. My full name-rank-and-serial-number is something like Professor Ernest James Carpenter MT FRCMS ZWG (Stuttgart) CSMI blahdy-blahdy; as well as being Visiting Professor of Effective Magic at Cambridge and Reader in Glamour and Enchantment at the University of Chicopee Falls, ID, I’m a senior consultant with J. W. Wells and Co. of 70 St Mary Axe, London. In practical terms, that means that if I want to I can make you think a raddled old boiler looks like Elizabeth Taylor, and that you’re a traffic cone. Hot stuff, obviously.
Your mother’s family, assuming she becomes your mother in the fullness of time, comes from a long (though frequently pruned) line of heroes, claiming descent from Beowulf on one side and Brian Boru on the other. How heroes come to have a long line beats me, since what they’re best at is dying young; however, it has to be said that what they’re second-best at is breeding like rabbits. Anyhow, your mum is the outcome of a millennium and a half of peerless swordspersons, brave dragonslayers, champions of the oppressed and similar pests. This means, I sincerely hope, that you will grow up to be both a hero and a magician – brave and clever, though there’s excellent grounds for saying the two qualities are mutually exclusive. But what the hell.
My intention is for you to join JWW at an early age, zoom up the corporate ladder like a ferret up a conduit, get made a partner before you’re thirty and be fully trained, armed and prepared when the moment comes when I’m either dead, incommunicado or too senile to blow my own nose, and someone has to take my place as leader of the human side in the secret war between us and those incomparable bastards, the Fey. I hope you won’t mind too much that I’ve condemned you to a life of danger, struggle and extreme weirdness without giving you the faintest vestige of a choice. I’m doing it for the best, needless to say. After all, the human race has got to be saved, and if I’ve been lumbered with the chore, I don’t see why I shouldn’t make someone else share the misery with me. Of course, you may well not see it like that if you take after your mother’s side. Did I mention that the heroic mentality has always been a complete and utter mystery to me?
Anyway, to practicalities. Obviously, I can’t predict how the war will go over the next thirty years or so, which means I can’t offer you much in the way of concrete, useful advice. By now, you should’ve worked out that Judy di Castel’Bianco is a truly nasty piece of work and you shouldn’t trust her any further than you can sneeze her through a blocked nostril; likewise, that the only way you’ll ever win this war is to get rid of her, once and for all. How you’re supposed to go about this, I have no idea. She can’t be physically killed (tried that; no dice) or locked up or mutilated to the point of effective disability; trying to destroy her mind and reduce her to the level of a gibbering loon is like trying to drown a fish in water. The only possibility I can think of is to find and eliminate her Source – as you probably know, each individual Fey is no more or less than a dream, dreamed by a sleeping human. If you find the dreamer – the Source, we call them – and wake him or her up, the dream stops and the Fey gets whizzed back to his own side of the line. Mostly, that’s not much help; next time the Source goes to sleep, the Fey comes back. But the relatively few specimens who’ve managed to establish themselves permanently on our side of the line – Judy, for instance – need to be dreamt continuously, without interruption. If their Sources wake up even once, they’re banished for good. That sounds encouraging; but understandably enough, the Fey go to enormous lengths to safeguard the Sources of their permanent colonists – they keep them constantly sedated, in a place so secure that no human has ever found it. Even if you were to discover it, I don’t imagine you could simply shin up a drainpipe and jemmy open the bathroom window. Fort Knox is most likely a bus shelter in comparison.
But there you go. Nobody said life was supposed to be easy, or fair, or even a guaranteed minimum length. I wish you the very best of luck, at any rate. By the way, if you’re nurturing any romantic notions of having nothing to do with any of this, going as far away as you can get and earning a modest but honest living mending typewriters in Bhutan, forget it. For one thing, I intend to fix it so you can’t; for another, even if you succeeded, Judy would almost certainly hunt you down and slaughter you like a Christmas turkey simply because you’re related to me. At least if you hold still and do as you’re told, she’s less likely to kill you on sight and more likely to try and subvert you into being useful to her, which would probably add maybe as much as five years to your life expectancy.
Happy hunting!
Your affectionate great-uncle-to-be,
Ernest Carpenter
Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Paul thought, wouldn’t it be absolutely fucking grand if Life somehow contrived to let five minutes go by without dumping some new and incrementally horrible load of shit on my head from a great height? He snapped the album shut; then, on a sort of guilty whim, opened it again at random. In the corner of the first snap that caught his eye, a moody study of a small, fat child eating an ice cream on a park bench, he saw a crumpled-up newspaper poking out of a litter bin. At once, the zoom business started up, and a moment or so later he was reading an article on the sports page, which said;
PS: In case I forget to remind you before I die or you read this: don’t play with the watch, and REMEMBER TO BURN THE CHALKS. Regards, EJC
Paul sighed; all right, already, he’d burn the stupid chalks. Only, how would you go about doing a thing like that? Soak them in petrol? Blowtorch? Or would putting them under the grill and pretending they were sausages get the job done just as effectively? Of course, if he still had his Portable Door, he could simply take a sideways journey to the slopes of Etna or Mount Washington and pitch them over the edge. But he’d lent the wretched thing to Ricky Wurmtoter, who’d lost it to the Fey. Suddenly he remembered the times he’d fallen asleep while wading through the incredibly loathsome Mortensen printouts at Countess Judy’s command; how each time he’d nodded off he’d dreamed about a portal in the wall through which platoons of evil kiddies had crept into the world. It all made perfect sense: Judy had the Door, and she’d given him the most boring job in the whole world so that he’d fall asleep right here in the office and dream across her advance guard of hand-picked storm troopers.
All at once, a sort of cold, brittle fury filled Paul. It wasn’t so much the disgusting, parasitic way she’d used him, like a fly laying its eggs in an open wound; it wasn’t even the manipulation, or the chilling thought of all those hundreds of malicious
ly grinning children, now safely across the line and poised to begin the task of wiping out the human race. No; what really, really ticked him off was that he’d been forced to sort and collate thousands and thousands and thousands of revolting Mortensen printouts, all through the weekend, in what should’ve been his free time, simply as camouflage, a diversion, a ruse. If ever there was a case of a tablespoon of insult with every teaspoon of injury, this had to be it—
Right, he thought. Fine. If I was born into this stupid bloody war, so be it; but the hell with Uncle Ernie and saving the world and someone having to do the dirty, rotten job, I’m going to make Countess Judy pay through the nose and all other relevant orifices for making me do all that work for nothing. Silently, he swore a solemn and dreadful oath to himself that he’d get her for that, if (as seemed entirely possible) it was the last thing he did.
So, what’d he got? Go after the Source, Uncle Ernie had said. Find out who’s dreaming Countess Judy and her fellow infiltrators, and where they were being stashed. Then wake them up. Simple as that.
Paul pocketed the stone before he lost it, in the process finding the stub end of a roll of Polo mints that he hadn’t remembered being there before (but it’s well known that stubs of Polo rolls breed in warm, dark, linty places), stood up and threw the photo albums back on the shelf. Oh, he thought, for a Portable Door right now. All he’d have to do would be to slap it on the wall, tell it to take him to wherever Judy stored her livestock, and that’d be that. But he didn’t have the Door any more, thanks to Ricky bloody Wurmtoter—
Ricky. A nasty thought stuck in Paul’s mind like a fish-bone. Hadn’t Uncle Ernie said something about a traitor inside JWW itself? At the time he hadn’t thought about it; he’d vaguely assumed that he’d meant Countess Judy, but that didn’t make sense. A traitor was a hidden enemy, not someone who paraded up and down in the corridors wearing a fluorescent sweatshirt with ENEMY written on both sides. But Ricky – Ricky had borrowed Paul’s Portable Door, the secret weapon that’d make it possible for Judy to bring across her storm troopers by the hundred, not one by one over a long period as she’d been doing previously. If Ricky was . . . There was a kind of grisly logic to it. As far as Paul knew, the Door had somehow been lost or hidden until he’d stumbled across it three months or so back; maybe Uncle Ernie or someone like that had deliberately hidden it away – that’s right, hidden it until the predestined saviour of mankind (me, fuck it) turned up to claim it. As soon as that happens, the traitor nips in and makes some excuse to get his paws on it, then vanishes. That would explain a lot of things: why Ricky hadn’t been in the cell with Paul and Monika; why he’d been put in Ricky’s department, apprenticed to him; why Ricky had always been so nice to him, bought him lunch on his first day and everything. Ricky was the traitor; and all that stuff about pretending to help Paul and save him, that night when Ricky had burst in through the window – that was just play-acting, intended to trick Paul into trusting him. The bastard. Never should’ve trusted a man with wavy blond hair in the first place. They’re all scum, those wavy blonds.
