by Tom Holt
‘Oh. Right. Look, what am I doing here?’
There was a long, long silence, during which Embarrassment joined the host of other unpleasant things floating about in the stale air.
‘Yes,’ said Eyesee eventually. ‘Look, it wasn’t my idea. Not my idea at all.’
‘Please . . .’
‘I mean,’ Eyesee said, gathering a bit of his customary momentum, ‘it’s bad enough being stuck down here in the dark and the damp with only Rehabilitation for company - the only card game he knows is snap, by the way, because of course he disapproves of gambling. He cheats.’
‘Why . . . ?’
‘Are you down here, yes, I was just coming to that.’ There was another pause. ‘And as for his charming habit of drying his socks over the radiator . . .’
‘Please,’ Jane said sharply. ‘Why am I here?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure? I mean, a moment ago you really wanted the light on, and . . .’
‘I’m really sure, yes.’
‘Well,’ said Eyesee; and Jane would have sworn he was taking a deep breath if she didn’t know for a fact that he’d have nowhere to put it, ‘the truth is, you’ve been promoted.’
You could have heard a pin drop. It would have had to have been a largish pin, because of the background noise. A crowbar, say. But at least nobody spoke.
‘Promoted.’
‘I thought you didn’t really want me to . . .’
‘Promoted to being tied up in a dark cellar with a thing with eighteen-inch maggots crawling in and out of its . . .’
‘Please!’ Eyesee exclaimed. ‘Oh God, you’ll have to excuse me a minute.’
The light went out, and Jane heard the sound of footsteps, followed by retching noises. A few seconds later, the lights came back on.
‘Sorry,’ said Eyesee hoarsely. ‘But I’ve got a weak stomach, actually, and the thought of . . .’
‘That’s perfectly all right,’ said Jane, with feeling. ‘It was thoughtless of me. But are you sure you mean promoted?’
‘As opposed to what?’
‘Well, found guilty, for starters. This really doesn’t fit in with my definition of upwardly mobile, you know.’
There was a long sigh, and Jane tried not to visualise what the breath was coming out of. ‘It’s a bloody awful job,’ said Eyesee at last. ‘Still, someone’s got to do it.’
‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘I think I see what you’re getting at.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes. I’ve been got rid of, haven’t I?’
‘That’s right,’ Eyesee replied, avoiding Jane’s eye. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he added, ‘truly I am.’
‘Can they do that?’ Jane asked, after a moment. ‘I mean, is it, well, legal, just tying an inconvenient member of staff to a plank of wood and abandoning them in a cellar for ever and ever?’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ Eyesee confirmed, and a hideous squeaking sound suggested that he was nodding his head, or what had remained of it, vigorously. ‘Their legal department’s thought it all through very carefully. You see, the Code states quite clearly that the employer is obliged to pay the employee the correct salary - depending on grade and experience, of course - and contribute to the pension scheme and let the employee have the agreed number of days’ holiday each year. There’s nothing in there about what the employee shall or shall not be tied to.’
Jane giggled. There was a faint metallic ring to her voice which suggested that although she wasn’t yet hysterical, this was only because she was saving hysteria for later. ‘But I’m not really an employee,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’m mortal. If I stay here, then sooner or later I’m going to die. Doesn’t that sort of put a different complexion on it?’
There was a long pause. ‘Are we talking about statutory sick pay here?’ Eyesee enquired cautiously. ‘Because I don’t know if death entitles you to that. Maybe it comes under the heading of early retirement. I think I’d have to look that one up.’
‘Would you mind going away, please?’
‘Sorry,’ Eyesee said. ‘I’ve offended you, I can tell.’
‘It’s not that,’ Jane assured him, ‘really. It’s just that you might get embarrassed when I start screaming, and . . .’
‘Got you,’ said Eyesee, hurriedly. ‘Yes, you’ve got a point there. Very considerate of you. I think I might . . .’
He stopped in mid-sentence, because a wall fell on him.
The way Bjorn had worked it out was like this.
There is no such thing as an idyll. Real life is nasty, sordid and boring, all about going to work and having to shave and the dustbin bags getting ripped open during the night by next door’s cat. Even in an infinite universe, there is nowhere you can get a plastic fork that won’t break.
Therefore, the idyll I’ve found myself in is artificial, and somebody’s put me here to stop me wandering about. Clever, really; if you want someone to stay locked up, put him in a prison he won’t want to break out from. Or at least one where he only finds out it’s a prison when it’s too late.
He thought of Ilona’s father, washing the ox-cart, not being allowed to walk on the floor, having to go out into the toolshed to smoke his pipe, and wondered what that poor bastard had done to offend the authorities. Something horrible, probably.
Having reached this conclusion, he set his mind to planning his escape. He reasoned:
This idyll is artificial, right?
That means somebody made it. It’s a thing.
Things break when you hit them.
The trick was to find the right spot. Ten years of splitting logs in the other bloody idyll had taught him that it’s no use going mad and slashing out wildly with the big axe, because all that happens if you do that is broken axe-handles. You have to find the seam, the flaw, the crack, the split, the lie of the grain, and you can be through it like ice cream through the bottom of the cone on a sunny day.
A hundred and seventy years in the Clerk of the Works’ Department had taught him how to look at the sky and the horizon and find the join.
He waited till nightfall, hiding out in the hayloft behind the smithy. Just after midnight, he opened the skylight and looked up. It was a clear night, and the stars shone out of a black velvet sky like rhinestones. Good. That made it easy.
The sky, with its million twinkling points of light, is only wallpaper, after all, put there to cover over the cracks in the vault of heaven caused by the use of cheap, bulk-bought plaster. Like all patterned wallpaper, it’s a real cow getting the edges lined up properly. If you look long enough, and know what you’re looking for, sooner or later you’ll find the point where the paper-hanger cocked it up; where the constellation whose real name is the Toothbrush of Adonis is duplicated on both sides of a millimetre-thick invisible line, and where the cosmos bulges out over an unsmoothed air-bubble. Follow the invisible line down to ground level, and you’ll find a tree whose branches are a little bit higher on one side than the other. That’s the join. Bjorn knew this because he too had served his time, up on a high stepladder with a bucket of paste and a long brush. He even knew what was underneath the stars . . .
(. . . A rather tasteless red textured flock, very frayed, with patches of mould in places and a few snags and nicotine stains here and there. Many people have wondered what was there before the Big Bang; well, where due north is now is where the dartboard used to be.)
If you’re not in a hurry, it’s possible just to peel the corner of the paper back, slip through and draw the paper back after you. If you couldn’t give a toss, however, you simply pack dynamite round the roots of the tree, retire and light a cigarette, the butt of which you carelessly discard.
Eyesee brushed brick dust out of what for the sake of convenience we shall describe as his eyes and looked blearily upwards, to find himself staring at a distinctly unfriendly sight. It wasn’t as bad as looking in a mirror, but it wasn’t far behind.
‘On your feet,
’ Bjorn said. ‘Come on, I haven’t got all sodding day.’
Eyesee blinked. ‘Excuse me?’ he said.
‘On your feet,’ Bjorn replied. ‘Jump to it, or you’ll get my boot up your . . .’ He broke off, and frowned. ‘Well, doesn’t look like you’ve got one, but we can always improvise.’
Eyesee jumped up quickly. ‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘I really wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble on my account. What was it you wanted to know?’
‘The way out.’
‘Ah.’ Eyesee cowered a little and backed away. He’d always wondered what it would feel like, being really frightened; well, he hadn’t been missing much. ‘That’s going to be rather tricky, really, because there isn’t one. At least, not in this dimension. I mean, not as such. Strictly speaking,’ he added.
‘Balls,’ Bjorn replied. ‘Talking of which . . .’
‘This way.’
At this point, Jane woke up. She’d been hit, oddly enough, by a falling star, and a fraction of a second later by a hand-sized lump of plaster. She groaned.
Thirty seconds is plenty long enough for quite a complicated dream, and Jane had dreamed that she was lying, tied to a railway sleeper, in the vaults of some vague but sinister building, while a monster who somehow managed to look exactly like her worst nightmare hid behind a thing like a giant beam engine and explained that henceforth, everything in the world was now officially her fault. That’s the trouble with the dreams you tend to get in the basement of the Department of Justice; no imagination.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh shit!’
This is a complicated moment to describe, so we’ll get Eyesee out of the way first. When Bjorn looked round, saw Jane and began staring, Eyesee ducked behind a lump of wall, tiptoed quickly away and found himself in the middle of a grassy meadow. Realising he’d come the wrong way, he turned to go back, only to find that the hole he’d just come out of had mysteriously vanished and been replaced by a slightly asymmetrical tree. He spent the rest of the night wandering about dejectedly, trying to avoid polished surfaces and pools of standing water, and at dawn came across a beautiful young shepherdess, who immediately took him home to meet her family. They were married three weeks later, and Eyesee now divides his time between washing up, exercising a small, vicious dog and painting the windows in the spare bedroom. Because he is simply Ilona’s husband, nobody even notices what he looks like any more.
‘Who’re you?’ Bjorn eventually asked.
‘Queen Victoria,’ Jane replied. ‘Look, will you please get this log off me?’
Bjorn felt cheated. He’d wanted to make a good impression. He’d wanted to stroll over and say, ‘Hey, lady, is that railway sleeper bothering you?’ He’d wanted to cut through the ropes with one clean sweep of his Zambian Army Knife, but the big blade was stuck fast and the attachment for taking stones out of impala hooves was as blunt as an armchair. In the end he managed to saw through the rope with the tin-opener, but not before he’d trodden on Jane’s foot and cut his fingers to the bone on the lanyard ring.
‘There you go,’ he said. ‘No trouble.’
Jane sat up and massaged her foot. ‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ she said. ‘Look, you’ve broken my heel. Why don’t you look where you’re going?’
‘Er.’
‘Er, what?’
‘Er. Sorry.’ Bjorn stood on one foot and chewed his lower lip. Even thus might Perseus have looked, had he swooped down from the vaults of heaven on his winged sandals, decapitated the sea-dragon and then rounded it off by stepping backwards on to the tail of Andromeda’s pet cat. ‘Sorry,’ he repeated helplessly.
‘That’s all right,’ Jane sighed. ‘Now, do you know the way out of here?’
‘Um, no,’ Bjorn replied, and blushed.
‘You don’t?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Never mind.’ Jane stood up, took off her other shoe and neatly knocked the heel off against the side of the sleeper. ‘They were new on,’ she added ruefully. ‘Oh well, can’t be helped. Do you have such a thing as a torch on you, by any chance?’
Bjorn shook his head, unable to speak. To get a line on his state of mind, imagine you’ve just kissed the sleeping princess in the enchanted castle, and she stirs, and opens her eyes, and turns her head, and then you notice the book beside her bed is called 1001 Cures for Chronic Insomnia.
‘Well, well,’ Jane tutted. ‘We’ll just have to try and find the light switch, won’t we? Come on, try and make yourself useful.’
When eventually Bjorn did find it (by walking into it and switching it on forcefully with his nose) he was extremely grateful. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Hey . . .’
Jane gave him a look, and it wasn’t friendly. Of course, it wasn’t his fault that the switch that operated the huge machine was right next to the light switch, and that he had a fairly broad nose; but she really wasn’t in the mood to make allowances.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ she snapped. ‘Switch the bloody thing off, quick.’
Bjorn reached out an arm, but too late. A force like a water cannon hit him in the chest and sent him bouncing off the walls like a squash ball, until he came to rest up in a corner of the ceiling. He had the unpleasant feeling that that was only temporary; basically, just so long as the ceiling could take the pressure.
‘You idiot,’ came Jane’s voice from somewhere he couldn’t see. ‘What have you done?’
‘Where are you?’ he panted back. It wasn’t easy; it was as if someone was trying to fold his shirt without removing him from it first. ‘I can’t . . .’
‘If you must know, I’m in the fireplace.’
Bjorn looked around, and noticed the tips of two shoes poking out of the chimney breast. Face facts, his soul whispered to his brain, even by your standards there have been more auspicious starts to a relationship.
‘What’s doing it?’ he tried to shout; but his voice came out ironed and pressed.
‘It’s that stupid machine,’ boomed the voice from the chimney. ‘It’s pumping air into this room faster than it can escape. Any minute now and I’ll be off up this chimney like a bullet up a gun. Satisfied?’
‘Hold.’ Bjorn struggled, pitting his pectoral muscles against the force of the machine. ‘On.’ That’s embarrassment for you; real, ear-tingling, bowel-churning embarrassment. Adrenaline is positively inert in comparison. ‘I’m.’ He kicked frantically against the wall, but all he achieved was a short rain of crumbling plaster. ‘Coming.’ His hand found the penknife in his trouser pocket.
‘Great,’ Jane replied. ‘That’s really cheered me up, you know?’
Until recently, Bjorn had always prided himself that he’d kept in pretty good shape - until very recently, in fact; right up until a few seconds ago, when Life had suddenly decided that he’d look better in just two dimensions - and there was the little matter of his self-esteem being at stake here as well. With an effort that a mere scientist would have dismissed as physically impossible, he pulled the knife out of his pocket, opened the big blade first go, and let the pressure do the rest. It drove the knife into the wall, which went pop.
Then there was a long, loud, extremely vulgar sound, followed by a thump as Bjorn fell off the wall on to his head.
‘It’s all right,’ he gasped, a few moments later. ‘I’ve switched it off now.’
‘About time too,’ came the reply from a long way off. ‘Now will you please get me out of this chimney?’
That proved to be the hardest one yet; and Bjorn was on the point of cutting his losses and tiptoeing quietly away when he noticed that the machine had a gear lever. And the gear lever had two positions; one marked Forward and one marked Reverse.
‘When you’re quite finished,’ said Jane, as she crawled out of the fireplace, ‘maybe we can get back to looking for the door.’
Bjorn nodded. There were little bright dots and flashes in front of his eyes, and the rest of him felt roughly the way you’d expect a tree to feel after someone has just turned it into a new
spaper. ‘The door,’ he whispered. ‘Right. Um, I don’t think there is one, you know?’
Jane breathed in deeply. ‘We came in through the wall, you mean? Or did someone wash the Universe and it shrank?’
Bjorn nodded. ‘I think I know this place,’ he said doggedly. ‘Used to work in this department once. This is one room where they don’t need a door.’
The sardonic comment withered on Jane’s lips. Instead: ‘They don’t?’ she asked.
‘No need,’ Bjorn replied. ‘The reason being, this place is basically, you know, inside your head. We’re in Justice.’
‘Justice?’ Jane blinked twice. ‘Look, where I come from, they have this thing called logic, and . . .’
‘Yeah,’ Bjorn replied. ‘And Justice, like, it works by being what you think should actually happen to you. You know, conscience and all that stuff. So they don’t have to bring you here, because you’re already here to begin with. That’s what they reckon, anyway,’ he added. ‘I never thought I had that much imagination, you know?’
Jane nodded. ‘Nor me,’ she said. ‘I think they brought me here. If this was my conscience I reckon I’d have recognised it by now, it’d be full of unwashed cups and dirty kitchen floors.’
Bjorn raised an eyebrow. ‘Since when did they need washing?’ he asked.
‘Later,’ Jane replied. ‘I think I’ve worked it out.’
. . . Very simple, though not very pleasant.
Where do you put inconvenient people so that nobody can ever find them? Inside your head, of course.
And suppose that you’re not actually allowed to do it. You’d feel guilty, wouldn’t you? Or at the very least, extremely worried about being found out. So, you put them in your conscience. Probably it just happens that way without you making a conscious decision, but it’s a very suitable place, because, in the very nature of things, your conscience is the one part of your brain that’s always kept sealed off from the rest.
‘So where are we?’ Bjorn asked.
Jane frowned. ‘That’s a good question,’ she replied. ‘First, I thought maybe I’d died and gone to Hell; but then I thought, Hang on, if this was Hell I’d be able to see the people who dreamed up the idea of putting fruit juice in little cardboard cartons with individual straws.’ She sighed. ‘So I guess it’s option number two.’
