by Steve Harris
Eventually she looked out of the window again.
And there was James, outside again, walking away from her with Martin draped over his broad shoulder in a fireman’s lift. She had been abandoned. She was stuck in the house with a god who had engineered her very existence and now there was nothing to prevent that god from taking that existence away from her again.
Suddenly she was angry. ‘Get up, you mongrel!’ she shouted furiously at Diamond. ‘Ellen said to rewrite the book and follow the dog. Well, I’ve done my bit, now you just get off your canine arse and do yours. Get me out of here!’
The dog didn’t move.
S’n’J felt tears of frustration spring to her eyes. She didn’t know how she had any tears left to cry after all that had happened, but there they were, clouding her vision and burning her eyes.
‘I’m frightened, Diamond,’ she said softly, settling on the floor beside the dog. She put her arm around it. It didn’t feel like a ghost dog at all. Diamond was warm and his short shiny coat was soft. She could feel big muscles beneath his skin.
‘I’m not frightened of dying,’ she sobbed into his coat, ‘I’m frightened of having to stay alive for ever. As someone else. Sarah-Jane will never have existed. Everything I was, everything I could be, will be gone. Do you understand that?’
The dog lifted his head and turned it towards her. Diamond Ambrose Anstey opened his mouth and licked her face. Once. His tongue was rough. When she looked at him, his expression didn’t look mournful at all, it looked playful.
S’n’J found a little smile quivering at the edges of her mouth. ‘You stupid dog,’ she said kindly, through her tears, ‘You don’t understand anything I say, do you? If I could, Diamond, I’d take you for a walk, teach you how to catch a ball and bark at intruders. Things like that. We’d have fun together.’
Diamond whined; a heart-breaking trill, deep in the back of his throat.
‘It’s too late, isn’t it?’ S’n’J said. ‘For either of us. We’re stuck here, aren’t we? For what’s going to be a very long time.’
‘Not for Sarah-Jane Dresden, it isn’t,’ Philip’s voice said from behind her.
She pushed herself up from the dog. Philip stood in the open doorway, a few sheets of paper and a pencil in his hand. He was smiling, but he looked flushed and his hair was tousled. This was the first time she’d seen him look anything other than as perfect as his pen name suggested.
‘Tough battle?’ S’n’J said, a glimmer of hope lighting again in her heart. The corners of Philip’s eyes showed distinct crow’s feet. They’d been there before, faintly visible in a good light but now they seemed quite deep.
Philip shook his head. ‘Not so tough, Snowdrop,’ he replied. ‘I knew how it would all end. Like I told you, I’ve finished the book. Writing the pyrotechnics was the difficult part, not the bringing them into reality. All I had to do was work on Janie to make that happen.’
‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ S’n’J said. ‘You worked on her a little too hard, didn’t you?’
Philip shook his head. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.
‘No you don’t,’ she cut in before he could tell her. ‘Just tell me one thing before you do whatever you think you have to. Tell me how the book ended.’
Philip paused. The lines around his eyes seemed deeper still. There were creases at the corners of his mouth now, and S’n’J definitely hadn’t seen those before.
He’s getting older, she told herself. He’s ageing right in front of my eyes. A question occurred to her then - one that she put straight out of her mind because it didn’t bear thinking about: If my creator dies, what will happen to me?
‘Well, I can tell you this. The house doesn’t burn down and Martin and James and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men don’t save poor Snowy.’
S’n’J tried to get up off the floor and could not. Her bad ankle shot horrendous bolts of pain up through her body when she moved it.
‘The very end, I meant,’ she said through teeth that were clenched against the pain.
‘Now’s not the time or place for that,’ Philip said tartly and walked past her.
She followed his progress across the room. He was walking like someone suffering from arthritis. When he lowered himself into his writing chair, he did it very carefully.
‘Bad back?’ S’n’J enquired, suddenly feeling a peculiar glee.
Philip ignored her and began to pick away the melted plastic that had dripped from the computer monitor on to his desk.
Why don’t you just magic it away, I wonder, S’n’J thought. She tried to get her good leg under her to push her to a standing position, but her ankle complained ardently.
Over at his desk, Philip laid down a sheet of paper on the space he had cleared, pencil poised.
Don’t let him start writing again! S’n’J thought and to distract him said, ‘How old are you, Philip? Only you don’t look thirty-eight any more. You look a little older. Forty-eight, maybe?’
‘Shut up and let me concentrate!’
‘Writer’s block?’
Philip turned away from her and began to scribble.
‘I’d say you were about eighty-five, in real terms,’ she postulated. ‘Without all the keeping young stuff you’ve been doing.’
‘Shut up!’ Philip repeated. His voice sounded rusty and a little quavery. Like the voice of someone very old.
‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ S’n’J added. ‘I think you’re ageing very rapidly because the house doesn’t have a human being feeding its furnace any more. Janie’s flown away to heaven, hasn’t she? And you used up all your power supply seeing off Martin and James. Now it’s almost run dry.’
Philip spun round in his chair. He had aged another ten years or so. He was a man approaching sixty, and approaching it badly. His skin was dry and yellow and loose. He looked exactly like someone living on borrowed time. He grinned and his teeth were yellow too. His eyes were the only things about him which still looked young and vital. And terribly angry.
S’n’J felt a fresh thrill of fear. But she wouldn’t let this stop her. ‘You’d like to take me downstairs and feed me to the house, wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘Well go ahead, if you think you have the strength!’ she challenged. ‘You can’t though, because you’re past it, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said and held out his hand, palm up. A ball of dull red fire the size of an orange appeared.
S’n’J glanced at it, then looked back into his dark eyes. She held his gaze.
‘I know your little secret,’ she told him. ‘You didn’t finish the story, did you? You’re lying about that, You had to melt down the computer to stop me writing any more because what I wrote became reality. That’s why you’re up here now with paper and pencil. Your tale is falling apart around you and you’ve come up here to try to stop the rot. Does that sound about right, Philip?’
‘No,’ Philip said quietly. Under the fireball his fingers were glowing re
d hot. ‘How could a mortal human do this?’ he asked, pointing at the effect with his pencil. ‘What you wrote didn’t come to be. Only what I write becomes reality.’
S’n’J glared at him. ‘You wish,’ she said.
‘I think we should say goodbye now, Sarah-Jane.’ And so saying, he flicked his hand towards her and the ball of fire rolled from it, flew half-way across the room, hit the floor… and fizzled out.
S’n’J glanced at the scorched piece of carpet. ‘Oh dear,’ she mocked. ‘You seem to have stopped being omnipotent and started being impotent.’
But Philip wasn’t listening. He had his back to her now and was writing quickly with the pencil. ‘ “Sarah-Jane ceased to exist,”’ he muttered.
And S’n’J felt something akin to an invisible shower of ice fall through her body. She suddenly felt empty and unreal.
Philip swivelled round in his chair. ‘You’re not still here, surely?’ he said. ‘How about if I add this?’ he said, turning back. ‘“It took a few minutes for it happen, but Sarah-Jane could do nothing to stop it. She already felt unreal and the sensation was growing.”’
‘no!’ S’n’J shouted and tried to stand. She seemed to be more pain than person now, which wasn’t fair. If she was fading away like the Cheshire Cat, her pain ought to lessen too.
‘“In ten minutes, history would have shifted itself. The fabric of the universe was rearranging itself so that Sarah-Jane Dresden, who was brought into creation by Philip Winter, had never existed at all.”’
S’n’J felt as light as her own shadow. Her good leg was under her now and she was pushing herself up in spite of the all-consuming pain from her bad leg. Her mind now held only one thought and this was wriggling like an eel trying to get out of a jam jar and back into the water.
‘“Everything she had been, everything she might have become, would soon be gone,’” Philip said and added, ‘I thought you’d like that bit. I heard you say it to the dog when I came in.’
S’n’J was on her feet now - or one foot and one column of raging agony. The rolling-pin was in her right hand and the two slippery words of her last-ever thought were pinned down inside her head.
GET HIM!
She walked across the room, moving silently and lightly. She was hardly any more substantial than a ghost now. She could hear no sound, feel nothing except the pain in her bad leg and the wooden handle of the rolling-pin in her hand.
Before her, Philip was bent over the desk, writing quickly. He was bald now, but for a few white hairs on the back of his head. His scalp was pale and dry. His clothes hung on him like a suit on a scarecrow made of sticks.
Each pace S’n’J took seemed to decrease her reality. By the time she got close enough to him to strike she felt no more substantial than a puff of air. Her body was fading away under her. When she raised the rolling-pin - which suddenly felt heavier than a sledge-hammer - she found she could see through her arm and hand.
Get him! The words rolled around in her empty mind like two marbles in the Hollywood Bowl.
The see-through arm brought the heavy rolling-pin up past her eyes and held it above her head.
‘Philip,’ she heard a tiny, distant voice say.
Philip turned round. Now he was a tiny, slack-faced old man whose toothless mouth hung open. So why did he look so fucking pleased with himself?
SVJ brought the rolling-pin down.
She started to regain her reality the moment the rolling-pin stove into the old man’s thin skull with a crack of splitting bone.
I did it! she told herself, pulling the weapon into the air again. I made him human again! I wrote the god out of him!
The crack of splitting bone resounded in her ears and it was a moment before she realized that she was not hearing his skull break at all, but the crack of the high-voltage power which was coursing from the room’s back wall and finding the wound in Philip’s skull.
S’n’J backed away, dismayed. She didn’t know what he’d been writing on the page, but it was more than he’d told her.
The power suddenly ceased. Blinding fire danced in the wound she’d made in the old man’s head and then Philip exploded in a blinding flash.
And when her eyes recovered, she screamed.
Instead of seeing the little old man lying dead on the floor as she’d expected, she saw two Philips. He had divided. Both men were half the age of the original and looked quite a lot fitter.
But if there are two, the total energy must he divided in half too! she told herself.
Both Philips grinned at her in unison. ‘I saved the best trick for last,’ they said.
S’n’J hopped forward and wrapped the rolling-pin around the side of the nearest Philip’s head. He flashed and split into two twenty-year-olds.
S’n’J struck out at one and made two ten-year-olds.
The surviving twenty-year-old grabbed her arm. He was strong. S’n’J spun round at him, dipped her head and butted him in the nose.
When she hit one of the ten-year-olds into which he divided, it broke into two five-year-olds which existed for a moment then flashed like lightning and disappeared.
‘Get away from me!’ she screamed, backing towards the door.
There were now three Philips in the room, all coming towards her, all boring into her mind with their eyes. The same hypnotic eyes gleamed darkly at her from three faces of varying ages. Wherever she looked the eyes caught her, pinning her into position.
The ten-year-old came closer to her. ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ this Philip piped in a frightened voice. His appealing little face and those searching eyes had her pinned. And if the others hadn’t both said these words in unison, S’n’J might have been lost.
But the hypnotic bond broke when the room filled with voices all saying the same thing.
S’n’J struck out at the boy, who broke into two younger boys and flashed into nothing.
‘You’re dead, Philip!’ she shouted and swung at the twenty-year-old, timing her return swipe so that it cracked through the heads of both ten-year-olds before they’d had time to form.
Then there was just her and one remaining Philip: the one closest to Philip’s original age.
‘Don’t kill me, Snowy,’ Philip said. ‘You know what’ll happen if you do, don’t you?’
She nodded. ‘I’ll die.’
‘That’s right. Those created by gods can only exist while the gods survive, and I am your creator.’
He came slowly towards her. ‘You don’t want to die, do you?’ he said.
S’n’J shook her head. His dark eyes were filling her, finding her soul. She started to become excited, suddenly wanting his body inside hers. Her heart rattled against her ribs and her mouth felt dry.
‘We don’t have to die,’ he said softly. ‘Neither of us do. We can both live. For ever if we want,’ he continued, still approaching. ‘We can be friends from now on. Can’t we?’
‘We can,’ S’n’J said. ‘If you promise not to change me.’
‘I don’t want to. Not anymore. I understand now. Y
ou’ve taught me that things only happen once and I can appreciate that. Zara, my original Snowy Winter, has had her turn and can’t come back. It’s your turn now, Sarah-Jane. And I’d like you to stay with me until whenever you decide to go. Will you do that?’
‘I will,’ Sarah-Jane said and held out her arms to accept him; held them out high enough to wrap around his neck.
Philip came towards her.
‘Just one thing,’ S’n’J said as he walked into her arms.
Philip stopped. An expression of suspicion passed over his face and was gone. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘I was taught how to lie by an expert,’ she said.
In the split-second pause that followed, three things happened.
Philip’s brow knitted in a display of puzzlement, S’n’J’s hands formed themselves into fists and she brought both of them hooking in towards the sides of Philip’s head.
There was a moment of searing heat, a blinding red flash, and glittering golden dust fell to the carpet where Philip had been standing.
‘It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind,’ S’n’J said to the remains of what had once been a god.
She checked herself, but she was not ceasing to exist now that Philip was gone. He might have brought her into being, but she existed independently of him now. Far from beginning to fade away, she felt a good deal more real than she had for what seemed like a very long time.
Put that in your pipe and suck hard on it, Peter Imperfect, she thought and flipped the finger at the golden stain on the carpet.
Over by the ruined computer case, Diamond Ambrose Anstey got up, yawned and made a show of stretching.
‘About bloody time too,’ S’n’J said. ‘Let’s get going, Diamond.’
34 - James Returns
