by Toby Frost
‘I’m not sure I do.’
‘Well then,” she said, and Smith realised that he had just placed his most important piece in check, ‘why don’t I show you, eh?’
Carveth finished her wine. ‘Mr Chumble?’
‘ Theophilius, please, if you would be so kind.’
‘Before the war, did you work in a theme park, by any chance?’
Chumble chortled. ‘Indeed I did, young miss, indeed I did! It was my pleasure to greet visitors to Dickensland – for the day out that lives up to great expectations. I ran The Old Curiosity Souvenir Shop for six years, excepting a short stint in the Bleak Haunted House. Then I was called up to replace the previous simulant. His name was Ezekiel Weaselsludge, and I am sorry to say that no good came of him.
Who would have thought it?’
As Smith covered his shamon liberally with salt, pepper and anything else that would disguise its taste, something started to rub itself against the inside of his leg. Starting, he looked around the room as if just informed that one of the fellow guests was a murderer. As the sensation moved higher, he checked the people within range: Dave, who being a computer had no limbs, Mr Chumble, who was packing his cheeks with food as if planning to hibernate; Captain Fitzroy, apparently preoccupied with stacking peas under her fork. He left out Carveth, whose legs were too short to reach him, and Suruk, who would have got Smith's attention by cutting the nonsense and booting him in the shin. Perhaps it was the cat. He had never felt so relieved at the thought of being dry-humped by a mutant feline.
The sensation rose. Felicity Fitzroy gave him a broad, conspiratorial smirk.
‘Captain Fitzroy?’ Carveth asked from down the table, ‘could you pass the Smash, please?’
Felicity Fitzroy whipped around in her seat, and the thing that had been brushing Smith's leg impacted violently with his kneecap. Smith yelped and leaped back. Suddenly, he was standing upright, the room ringing with his shout. In the silent chamber, the butlerbot clattered over to dispense mashed potato.
Smith looked down the table. Faces turned to him like flowers towards the light, in expectation of some sort of trick.
‘Something wrong, sir?’ Chumble inquired. ‘Is it ague?’
‘Er,’ Smith said. He stood there as if shoved onto a stage, suddenly the centre of attention. He realised that quick thinking was called for. ‘A toast! I propose a toast!’
Captain Fitzroy raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes. To, ah, friends and family. Such as my girlfriend,’ he added, quickly filling his glass. Smith raised the glass but realised suddenly that nobody else had moved. He caught Carveth's eye: surely she would be glad to assist in any drinking ritual. ‘Such as my girlfriend,’ he repeated helplessly. ‘Carveth?’
Felicity Fitzroy stood up. ‘Well then,’ she declared. ‘To Captain Smith's girlfriend… Miss Carveth.’
The officers and crew rose to their feet. In the rumble of voices and the scrape of chairs, Smith was unable to hear what Carveth was saying to him. Something to do with plucking and idiots, it seemed.
Smith sat down again. Shuttles and Captain Fitzroy began to discuss the peas. Suruk was dividing his attention between his cutlery and the cat. Chumble was talking to Dave about Christmas future.
Carveth finished her wine in two swigs and, muttering something about the lavatory, made a set of deliberately incomprehensible gestures and scurried towards the door.
*
Carveth opened the airlock and wandered back into the John Pym. She pulled the door closed behind her and spun the wheel for good measure.
God almighty! How did Smith manage to be so stupid? How the hell had he managed to turn a simple act of standing up into claiming to be romantically linked to her? Business as usual: as long as she didn’t actually have to simulate any sort of affection towards him it would probably be tolerable. Smith was a decent bloke, but… God… no… ugh! That moustache, that collection of model spaceships. .
Still, soon they’d be out of here, delivered safely to the Empire in the armoured belly of the Chimera. Carveth pulled a face and wondered whether it was time for bed. She had several back issues of Pony And Very Smal Horse Monthly to peruse, along with The Young Lady's Inspiring Chapbook and More Inspiring Chaps for the Young Lady. It seemed too early to sleep, but she was too fuzzy-drunk to want much more booze.
Carveth put the kettle on and ransacked her secret biscuit stash, only to find that she had already cleaned it out some time she couldn't remember. Her second secret biscuit stash yielded better results.
‘Gotcha!’ she muttered, digestive in mouth, as she stuffed the front pockets of her dress with food. ‘You can't outwit me!’
She made a cup of tea big enough to drown a cat and thought about the dinner party she'd left behind. Why wasn't there anyone normal around? No, not even normal. Not crazy would do. Someone who didn't collect skulls, or hadn’t escaped from the Charles Dickens theme park. If a person was known by the company they kept, Carveth would be judged on the standards of several lunatics and the Patent Oscillating Lady's Companion currently charging up on the wall socket under her bed.
The door to the hold was open. A small person moved at the far end of the hold, a girl in blue – her reflection. Carveth walked in, steam rising from the mug in her hand.
The dim light caught in the ornate frame. Carveth stood in front of the mirror, puzzled for a reason she couldn’t quite decide, and realised that the frame had been put together wrong.
She set her tea on a packing case and crouched down. In the bottom-left corner there was a sort of broken square design, as if a tile had been smashed into three. As she reached out to touch it, she saw that there were tiny grooves in the carving. Perhaps the pieces could be moved.
They slid under her fingers. It was the easiest thing in the world to turn them and push them into place until they had locked together to form a diamond.
She stepped back. It looked slightly better, but the other corners were still wrong. In the top right there was a curved thing: a broken heart symbol. Again, the elements turned and locked into place. There, much better.
Suddenly, she noticed that she was cold. ‘Brr,’ she said, as if to confirm it, and she took a deep swig of tea, thinking that she needed to find a jumper and maybe put on something thicker than stripy tights. After she'd finished this, though.
Above the diamond, a symbol like a heart with a spike growing out of it. No, not a spike at all. It clicked as her fingers turned it. It was a spade.
‘That's clever,’ she said, ‘it's cards.’ They'd go crazy for something like this on the Antiques Roadshow. Last week they'd had a bottle of something called Diet Coke, which had ended up being sold to the British Museum. Who knew what an artefact like this mirror would fetch?
The last of the corners was trickiest, but Carveth knew what she was doing now. The three circles clicked into the tail, and the final suit, the club, was complete. Carveth picked up her mug and stepped back to admire her work – and with a bang like thunder the hold door slammed shut.
She leaped around, and as she did a faint glow spread from under her boots. Some sort of emergency lighting had come on beneath the floor. It crept around the edges of the floor tiles, drawing a chequerboard across the hold. But surely emergency lights were red, not this cold shade of blue?
Like an automaton, she lifted her tea to her mouth again. Moral fibre, she told herself, it's full of moral fibre, and she forced herself to look around, knowing as she did that she had made a terrible mistake.
The mirror was the same as before. But the reflection had changed. What were those things hanging from the roof, criss-crossing in front of the hold door like ropes? She glanced back at the real hold door – and all sense seemed to have evaporated. There were paper chains across the doors, each link made from a playing card.
The air was alive with sound, as if a bird fluttered around her head. As though paper was being shuffled. But that wasn't the worst of it, not by a million mil
es.
There were people in the mirror. They stood behind her reflection as if they had formed from the shadows of the mirror-image.
The one on the right wore a hood, pulled up to a sharp peak over a grinning skull’s mouth.
Beside it, a fat crowned thing patted a bulbous sceptre against its palm like a billyclub. The third wore a sort of metal brace on its neck, which pulled its cheeks and chin into sharp points. Now that the world had gone completely insane, their awful faces made perfect sense to her: diamonds, clubs, ace of spades.
But the last suit –
‘My,’ said a voice behind her, ‘how you’ve grown!’
Carveth whirled around. A figure stepped from the shadows of the hold, her skin grey in the bad light. A heart had been cut out of the chest of her red robe. Axes hung from her belt. But none of that compared to the vast construction on her bald head. Attached by a ring of masonry nails, it rose out of her scalp like a little tower: half crown; half oversized chess piece.
‘Who are you?’ Carveth gasped.
The woman’s voice was a deep, stern growl. ‘Players of games, explorers of wonder. As if you didn’t know.’
‘Card games?’
‘Oh, far more than that. We also do chess and backgammon. And the pleasures of the flesh,’ she added, with extreme relish.
‘Really?’ Carveth’s stomach rumbled. Terror had left her rather hungry.
‘Oh yes. We can show you experiences beyond your imagining. Logic and proportion are nothing to us. Taste our pleasures.’
‘You’ve got food, then? I don’t suppose you’ve got a pie, maybe?’
The queen shook her bald, crowned head. ‘Where we’re going, we won’t need pies. Besides, that was a metaphor.’
‘Oh.’ Well, Carveth thought, so much for wondrous pleasures. She decided not to explore that avenue any further. After all, anyone who thought that nailing a big hat to their skull might be a good idea was not qualified to suggest fun ways to spend an afternoon. ‘Look, I think you’ve got the wrong person.’
‘Oh, I think not,’ snarled the queen. ‘Let’s see: blonde hair? Check. English accent? Check. Blue dress? Check. Prissy little pain in the arse? Check and mate.’
‘But I’m just a nobody!’
‘A pawn to some, a queen to others.’ She stepped forward and licked her blue lips. ‘So, what’s it to be? Red queen takes white pawn, to mate in one move?’
‘No, wait! No mating, please!’
‘Ah, so chess is no longer an option.’ She flexed her fingers. ‘Perhaps our game will be a little more. . mature in nature, now that you are all grown up. Poker!’
‘Don’t poke me!’ Carveth squealed. ‘Please, I don’t want to join your club. Alright, I’ve done some bad things, but. . never with props. Well, except for one but, come on, let’s be reasonable here.’ She shuffled back. ‘I know – why don’t we play Scrabble with rude words? My boss says it's great. I could get you a drink, some migraine tablets perhaps –’
‘You have migraine tablets?’ the queen stopped. She paused, then took another step forward.
‘No. Why cheat the senses? Welcome back, child.’
The figures advanced from the edge of the room. One slipped a card from its leather sleeve – the Jack of Diamonds – and drew it across its palm. A needle-thin stripe of blood appeared: a paper cut.
‘Six hundred years I’ve waited to get my hands on you,’ said the queen. ‘We have such wonders to show you.’
Carveth took another step away from them but her back met the wall. ‘The others’ll be here soon. They won’t like it, you know, you just – I’ll tell Lord Prong. I’ll tell him you were trying to do it with me!’
Six inches from her, the Queen of Hearts said, ‘What?’
‘I’ll tell him. I swear I will, unless you let me go. You’ll be in such trouble –’
‘How do you know Prong?’ the creature with the diamond-shaped face whispered.
‘He’s our –’ Carveth paused, unsure whether these horrors would consider Prong to be an enemy or a friend – ‘we just know him.. ’
‘The usurper!’ the queen growled. ‘He bound and tormented us – and not in a good way.’ A sort of realisation crept across her grey face. ‘Bring him to me!’
‘But I don’t –’
‘Don’t you gyre with me, you uffish little girl! Bring him to me, and then maybe, maybe, we’ll leave you alone.’
Carveth started to speak but the queen raised a finger to her lips. In a swish of stitched leather, the others turned away. They stepped into the mirror in turn, each vanishing into the flat, polished glass.
In the reflection, lightning crackled.
The Queen of Hearts looked back and Carveth’s stomach twisted in fear. ‘Prong,’ the queen said, rolling the R. ‘Because if you don’t – it’s off with your head.’
And with that, she stepped back through the mirror. Her crown impacted loudly with the top of the frame, and the queen ducked through, snarling about migraine.
And then she was gone.
*
‘So let's go through this again,’ Smith said. ‘You came back here, you made a cup of tea, you ate a biscuit and then you summoned Satan. I can’t leave you for five minutes, can I?’
‘Indeed,’ Suruk replied. ‘It is terrible. I really liked those biscuits. Especially the ones with the picture of a cow. I like breaking the heads off,’ he added, as Smith passed him a mug. ‘Thank you.’
‘It wasn’t the Devil,’ Carveth replied. ‘You’re making me sound crazy. They were talking playing cards.’
‘Well,’ said Suruk, ‘just be pleased that you were not stuck at a table, obliged to drink wine and eat pudding. It was most tiresome.’ The idea of a portal to Hell seemed to have cheered him considerably.
‘Perhaps you ought to have played cards, if they asked nicely. Who knows what you could have won?’
Smith frowned. ‘Just because they were polite doesn't make it a good idea. Last Christmas you asked nicely for a chainsaw, Suruk. And the Christmas before that…’ He took a deep sip of tea and closed his eyes for a moment, waiting for the concentrated moral fibre to reach his mind. ‘It seems to me that there's only one thing to do. We'll tackle this the way we tackle all our difficult problems.’
‘Indeed,’ Suruk snarled. ‘With righteous fury in our hearts and a blade in our hands! Many blades!
Many blades of considerable size!’
‘Let's just lock it away and pretend it didn't happen,’ Carveth said. ‘Like Suruk did with his offspring.’
The alien sat down again, slightly crestfallen. ‘Oh, them,’ he said. ‘I was hoping no one would remind me.’
‘I wish Rhianna was here,’ Carveth said. ‘She’d have something up her sleeve. Probably just a joint, but better than nothing.’
‘Both of you have a point,’ Smith put in. ‘But for now, the most important thing is that the cause of all this trouble is chained down and put away.’
Carveth leaped to her feet. ‘Wait!’
‘I'm talking about the mirror,’ Smith said. ‘Listen, crew… it may be that we've activated some kind of portal to another dimension, or that Carveth has finally flipped her lid and gone completely doolally. Our eventual task will be to determine whether this thing does actually lead to some sort of hellish netherworld and, if so, claim it for the British Space Empire. But for now, we must contain the mirror as best as we can. Given that the engine room is currently full of man-eating frogs, I propose that we chain the mirror and store it in the hold, face down. Then, we tell nobody until we reach safe haven and deliver it to the authorities. All clear?’
He was relieved, and quite surprised, to see that they understood. They got up from the table, ready for bed. Suruk cheerily volunteered to help secure the mirror. He seemed entirely unconcerned by the idea of demons emerging from it. Perhaps that sort of thing was usual in his culture, Smith reflected, or maybe he just relished the challenge of cutting off Satan’s head.
&nb
sp; ‘Time to rest, Mazuran,’ said the M’Lak. ‘We must consider this tomorrow. I will stand guard. If there is any change, you will know, albeit probably from the sounds of battle.’
‘Thanks, Suruk. I appreciate it. Listen, do you think there is anything in this?’
‘I do not know. Many years ago, when I was a mere spawn, impressionable and technically incapable of criminal responsibility, the elders of my tribe told me of a land beyond the great waterfall that plummets over the cliffs of Bront. He who recited the correct charm and then leaped through the waters, would emerge in a land of wonders. So I travelled for nine days, until the waters were in sight.
Speaking the charm, I sprang through the waterfall.’
‘What did you see?’
‘Stars, Mazuran. I knocked myself out on the cliff. The elders were lying through their mandibles.
How they laughed when I returned. To begin with.’
‘Righto. Pardon me, but how does this affect our current position?’
‘Not even slightly.’ Suruk gave Smith a reproachful look. ‘What a peculiar question!’
‘Well, time for bed, eh?’ Smith turned back to his room.
For once he felt glad that Rhianna was not there. Carveth was going crazy – really, properly bonkers – and now he was too. Smith had received a transmission from the spirit world: Carveth had ventured into another dimension accessible through a looking glass. What next?
Smith stood beside his bed, the model aircraft dangling around his head as if attacking King Kong. He reached over to the bookshelf, fished out the Boys’ Bumper Book of British Gumption and flicked through to the history section.
Strange things had often happened in the past and it was only recently that many of them had become publically known. Aresian death-tripods had landed in Reading in 1898, but luckily the fresh air had braced the aliens to death before they had done any damage; it was highly likely that the first simulant had been created during a thunderstorm in the early nineteenth century; archaeologists had found the severed arm of a M'Lak hunter in the ruins of a Viking longhouse, along with a dozen headless Vikings.
