Earth, Air, Fire & Custard Tom Holt

by Earth, Air, Fire

  'Thought I'd make sure you didn't forget and slip away early,' she said, parking herself on the edge of his desk. 'You tend to do things like that. Tea-bag memory, as my Uncle Howard would say.'

  Paul grinned feebly. 'How are we getting there?' he said. 'I don't even know where we're going.'

  'Don't worry about it,' she replied. 'I'll make sure you get there. Besides, we aren't going far. Walking distance.'

  He followed her; down the corridor past the closed file-store, up the back stairs to the photocopier room, along the passage leading to Mr Suslowicz's office (though last week it had been on the first floor, and now it was on the second), through the staffroom fire escape, which actually led down a tunnel, a marble-faced tube eight feet in diameter going straight ahead and slightly uphill, which if he stopped to think about it was absolutely impossible. . . Down the tunnel for what felt like half a mile, through a massive steel door- 'It's not much,' said Mr Tanner's mum, 'but it's home.'

  It was a huge open space; sand-floored, like an arena, circular, the bottom of another vast tube, so tall that the other end, a dazzling blue circle, looked no bigger than a sequin. Paul realised that he was facing the stands of an amphitheatre; row upon row of stone benches raked steeply uphill, almost but not entirely surrounding him. Three hundred degrees of seats, and every single one appeared to have a goblin in it.

  'Meet the folks,' Mr Tanner's mum whispered in his ear. 'Just think, every single one of them's your long-lost cousin.'

  Her claws were gripping his shoulder like a G-clamp, so running for it wasn't on the cards, unless he fancied leaving his arm behind. 'Now what?' he hissed back. 'You never did tell me what I'm supposed to do.'

  'No,' she replied. 'I didn't.'

  Then he felt her hand in the small of his back, and he shot forward, scrambling furiously to keep from treading on his own feet. A devastating wall of sound hit him; it was the goblins, all cheering at the same time. Paul had always wondered what it'd be like to be really popular, but in his daydreams it hadn't been like this.

  'You know I told you this was a rehearsal?' Mr Tanner's mum whispered in his ear.

  'Yes?'

  'I lied. This is the real thing. Not something you can rehearse, if you get my meaning.'

  The rampart of faces staring at him were blurring, melding into one vast composite goblin grin. 'It'd lose that fresh impromptu edge, you mean?' he said.

  'That too. But think about it. What things are there you can only ever do once in a lifetime?'

  Before Paul could say anything, he sensed that she'd gone, and he stood there, alone in front of maybe twenty thousand goblins, reflecting on the last thing she'd said. Offhand, his mental agility somewhat impaired by the context, he could think of three things that fitted her criteria. None of them were things he'd want to do in front of a crowd, and two of them he'd done already.

  No, belay that. All three.

  Even so. A polished bronze trapdoor, twelve feet square, appeared in the sand in front of him and gradually slid open, with much rumbling of chains and graunching of badly lubricated moving parts. No prizes for guessing which of the three Mr Tanner's mum had in mind. Something fell at his feet with a thud, just missing his toes; he glanced down and saw a long, wide-bladed sword, with a pink ribbon incongruously fastened around the handle. In this life, he could distinctly remember his dad saying when he was fourteen and asking for the money to go on a school trip to Bruges, there are times when you just have to make sacrifices. Among the goblin community, it seemed, christenings were just such an occasion.

  Help, he thought, but without any great enthusiasm. No point, and it'd be too bad if the last emotion he ever experienced was disappointment. Meanwhile the trapdoor had slid wide open, and up through it on a slowly rising platform appeared- A cake. A huge, enormous ziggurat of a cake, with battlements of piped white icing, candles like ships' masts, spun-sugar bobbles like cannon balls and a single glacé cherry on the top like the dome of the Kremlin. Its bottom tier was fenced around with a silver-foil wrapper as tall as the ramparts of Constantinople, and written on it in prussian-blue letters five yards high were the words Happy Christening Paul Azog Tanner.

  Something you only do once in a lifetime: cut the first slice off a fucking great big cake. Well, Paul thought, of course. Silly me not to have figured it out earlier.

  'Go on, then,' hissed a voice offstage; so he pottered across the sand towards it. It took him two minutes to get there, and he was trying not to dawdle. The crowd had gone deathly quiet; here and there flashguns popped, but otherwise there was no movement in the encircling goblin cliffs. When he reached the foot of the cake, he craned his neck up until it hurt, and still couldn't see the top.

  Never mind; he was here now, he could do his job and then, presumably, that was his part in the proceedings over with. Deep breath; then he swung the sword up over his head and buried it up to the hilt in the cake wall before him.

  It went in easily enough. Fist-sized shards of white sugar cracked off and rained down around him, like plaster from a ceiling, and around the wound he'd made great cracks and fissures started to appear. Paul dragged the sword free and stepped back; crushed flat by an avalanche of cake crumbs would be a really silly way to die. The cake was definitely starting to split open -he could hear the groans and creaks of stressed fabric, like a great tree torn apart with wedges. Suddenly, in a fraction of a second, the wall gave way; and out through the side of the cake burst a bevy (only word for it) of beautiful young women in spangly bikinis, with tinsel wreaths wound in their piled-up blonde hair. They rushed forward towards him, squealing.

  Goblin taste, he thought; just what you'd expect from a people in whose mythology the sun was formed from the bronzed baby shoe of the sky-god. Utterly naff, but nevertheless harmless enough, in its way- Then the party girls were all round him, and Paul suddenly (but too late) remembered the one thing about goblins he'd been sure he'd never ever forget, as the bimbo nearest to him changed seamlessly back into her true shape and swung at the side of his head with a double-headed battleaxe. Somehow he managed to get his sword up to block the slash; he could feel the shock of impact jarring the tendons of his arms right down into both elbows. The goblin hissed furiously through her curved yellow fangs and stepped back to start another swing; meanwhile the goblin next to her was lunging at his solar plexus with a triple-barbed lance. He avoided that too, mainly because his shoelace had come undone and he'd stood on it, and the ensuing stumble took him out of the way of the lance's needle-sharp point. Unfortunately, as he staggered and fell, a goblin to his right stepped forward and jabbed at him with a halberd, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Paul heard an explosion of cheering as the blade slid into him, and as the light grew pale and the focus softened, his last conscious thought was that, just for once, he appeared to have lived up to someone's expectations. Well, not lived up, actually the exact opposite, but-

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He was sitting in a chair; a tubular chrome and vinyl one, next to a smoked-glass table, opposite another similar chair, in which sat a bronzed, well-groomed middle-aged man in a blue shirt with a bit of wire sticking out of it. Behind the man's head he could see a large camera, while overhead swayed a couple of microphones on long steel poles. The man was smiling and staring past him at something: a screen on the wall, where a mob of savage and hideous goblins were stabbing and hacking at some object lying in the dust.

  'So, Paul,' said the man, and the camera started to edge forward on its hydraulic boom. 'How do you think it went?'

  Paul could feel the corners of his mouth pull apart in a smile, and he heard himself say, 'Well, David, obviously we're a bit disappointed with the final result, but we know we gave it our best shot, the lads all done brilliant on the day, it's just a shame someone's got to come second, really.'

  The man nodded gravely, as though he'd just got a straight answer out of Plato. 'I'd like to take you through a few of the key moments from the game, Paul, if I may. Le
t's kick off with the beginning, shall we? On reflection, maybe not the best start you could've got off to.'

  On the screen, Paul saw a hospital ward, a nurse handing a bundle to a woman lying in bed; close-up of his mother's face (he recognised it from old photographs) then a smart cut across to the ugliest-looking baby Paul had ever seen, wriggling and grizzling and waving its little fists in the air. 'Well, David, the lads felt the conditions were dead against us, I mean obviously they weren't what we'd have chosen for ourselves, but that's the game, you got to play the cards you're given and just get out there and give it a hundred and ten per cent, which maybe we didn't quite manage to do on this occasion. But it's been a learning experience for all of us, and-'

  Now the screen showed a sullen-looking kid in a navy-blue blazer, tie knotted under his chin, standing on his own in the corner of a crowded playground. Cut to the same small boy crouched sobbing in the corner of a large, sparse school bathroom, while a bunch of larger, more cheerful kids methodically flushed the contents of his school bag down a toilet. 'For me,' the man called Dave was saying, 'it was pretty much lost and won here, right in the opening stages, and afterwards you never really had a chance to climb back into the game. Is that a fair assessment, do you think?'

  Paul's head nodded of its own accord. 'Absolutely, David,' he said. 'Their lads were absolutely magic, can't take anything away from them, and we're going to be going over the videos of this stage of the game very carefully over the summer.' As his mouth moved, a little voice was whispering inside his mind, in the dark corners where nobody ever needed to go: goblin taste, goblin humour, goblin appearances; don't forget the one thing about goblins you really need to remember. At this point, Paul noticed he was still holding the sword.

  Meanwhile: 'How would you react,' the man called Dave was asking him, 'to the guys in the media who've been saying all along that your leadership style's been too laid back and sloppy and you didn't train nearly hard enough and that really, you've let down the fans back home who actually believed you could pull it off?'

  Paul grinned. 'Like this,' he said, and with a single sweep of his arm, he sliced Dave's head off with the sword and watched it sail across the room, bounce off the opposite wall and land with absolute precision in a small metal dustbin. Quite a few of the cameramen cheered, and someone let off an air-horn.

  Smiling, Paul stood up and walked away. Outside the glaring circle of the studio lights it was dark and cool, and he was feeling quite tired. Goblins, he thought; bless them. It stood to reason that at a goblin party you had to have beautiful girls jump up out of a cake and attack you with savage weapons, just as the goblin idea of your past life flashing in front of your eyes at the point of death was inevitably a Grandstand interview. He was also absolutely convinced, though he had no data on the subject, that goblinkind's favourite TV show was Benny Hill, but Forrest Gumped with cutting-edge computer-graphics technology to include scenes of gratuitous slaughter. My relatives, he told himself. Devious, vulgar and blessed with a degree of cunning that it was fatally easy to underestimate, but flawed nevertheless with the assumption that everyone was like them, deep down. Outside the immediate confines of the genome, however, they hadn't got a clue.

  Of course, he reflected as he walked further into the darkness, he did have the fairly unique advantage of having died twice already. Arguably, if he didn't have that rather unusual insight, which quite possibly they weren't aware of, it was quite likely that he would believe he'd just been killed, and that this was the underworld, the afterlife, the kingdom of the dead. In any event, he felt he'd established beyond reasonable doubt that that was what they wanted him to think. Which led on to the thorny question, why? What good was it doing them, and how could it possibly be relevant to the christening of baby Paul Azog?

  Paul wrestled with that one for a while, but try as he might he couldn't find a satisfactory answer, so he shelved the question and began to speculate about what might happen next. Not that it mattered. After all, none of this was real, so none of it mattered. He knew it wasn't real, because he knew precisely what the realm of the dead looked like: dark, flat, featureless, neither hot nor cold, dry nor wet, nothing so positive; and after a while, when you got bored with strolling across a blank canvas, you came to the entrance to the Bank of the Dead, where Mr Dao would be waiting to greet him- 'Paul?'

  The voice was familiar. He looked round, trying to see where it was coming from, but realised that he was completely disorientated in this dark, flat, featureless landscape.

  Pause. Rewind. Freeze.

  Come to think of it, he muttered to himself, it's also neither cold nor hot, wet nor dry. And the voice he'd just heard was that of Benny Shumway. He opened his mouth to yell, but nothing came out.

  'Shit, Paul, I didn't know,' Benny's voice went on. 'Nobody ever tells me anything around here. Bloody hell, mate, I'm so sorry.' Hesitation, rather than a pause for a reply. Benny had been here often enough (once a day, to pay in the cheques, draw the petty cash, check the automated credits) to know that the dead can't answer back or see you, they can only just hear your voice, faint and coming from no particular direction. 'Well,' Benny continued awkwardly, 'I just hope it was painless and quick, and tomorrow I'll see about bringing you something, a drop of goat's blood or a bit of raw liver. I really am sorry, chum. You got right up my nose sometimes and I can never forgive you for sending Judy away, but some of the time I actually did quite like you.'

  Benny. Benny, wait for me, get me out of here, there's been a terrible mistake, don't go. Paul could just hear an echo of the words inside his own head, but no voice speaking them; really, nothing more than the shape and shadow of the thoughts, and that only because he was so recently arrived. Of course Benny couldn't hear him, because Benny was still alive.

  Desperately, Paul tried to see something, any damn thing; or hear, or smell, or touch, or taste. No dice. Then, just as he'd found a crumb of reassurance in the fact that he hadn't seen the Bank or Mr Dao, another familiar voice spoke out of the darkness and spoiled all that for ever.

  'Mr Carpenter,' Mr Dao said. 'Again. What on earth brings you here?'

  And there he was, exactly the way Paul remembered him: grave, distinguished, almost sympathetic and kindly but not quite. Mr Dao, manager of the Bank, walked out of the absence of light and bowed formally to him.

  'Mr Dao. Look, this is wrong. I shouldn't be here.'

  A gentle glow of pity and understanding in his eyes, deep as an artesian well. 'Alas,' Mr Dao said. 'How often I've heard those very words, and always so true. Of course you shouldn't be here, Mr Carpenter. Nobody should be here. But-' He shrugged, thin shoulders lifting a little under the deep blue silk of his robes. 'We all have our cross to bear, Mr Carpenter, and in the end all we can do is make the best of it. You'll find it isn't as bad as all that here; we have a bridge club, if you play at all, and a very strong choral society; or you can sign up for an excellent choice of evening classes. Only the other day, for instance, we added flower arranging, conversational Turkish and beginners'-level lawnmower maintenance. I won't pretend that everything here isn't agonisingly boring and pointless, but we do make an effort.'

  'This is wrong,' Paul repeated helplessly. This is wrong, it's just Mr Tanner's mum and her loathsome relatives playing a stupid trick on me. You aren't the real Mr Dao, you're just- 'His ghost.' Mr Dao smiled wanly. 'To coin a phrase, this is as real as I get.' He folded his arms and tucked his hands into his capacious sleeves. 'Mr Carpenter,' he said, then made a supreme effort. 'Paul, if I may. I'm sorry. There has been no mistake. Your name is there on the arrivals board, which is why I came out specially to meet you. There is an explanatory note; it says, "killed by goblins", if that's any help to you in understanding the sequence of events. Not that it matters. You must face this fact: as far as you are concerned, nothing matters, nothing will ever matter again. We used to have a banner, Paul, we rigged it out over the front entrance every time new guests arrived until the time-and-motion consultants pointe
d out that it was depressing and counter-productive and made us throw it away. But I disagree with them. It said: "Abandon hope, all you who enter here"; and I still maintain that it was the best and most constructive advice that can be given to someone in your present situation. You must accept this, Paul; down here, hope is not your friend. There is nothing to hope for here, just as there is nothing to be afraid of. Quite simply, there is nothing. Deal with it.'

  Paul stared at Mr Dao for a moment; then it was as though he'd just woken up out of a particularly vivid and disturbing dream to find himself in his bed, in his red and white striped pyjamas, suddenly and rather foolishly aware that he'd got himself into a dreadful state over nothing at all. Just as the dream fades and gets thin and evaporates as the light bleaches it away, so his memories of having been alive, all the stuff he'd tried to bring with him and now realised that he wouldn't be needing after all, began to melt and thaw away; because he'd woken up out of a strange and disturbing dream about being alive, but it was all right now, and he knew that it had all been just a- 'No,' he said. 'No,' he repeated. 'Sorry, but it can't be like that.

  I mean, they wouldn't have killed me, they had no reason to. I was being little Paul Azog's godfather.'

  Mr Dao was frowning sympathetically, but frowning nonetheless. 'They're goblins, Paul,' he said. 'That's reason enough. Human sacrifice is part of their rich cultural heritage. But you mustn't worry about that any more. The important thing is that you're here, and this time you're here to stay. Now I'm prepared to bend the rules for you a bit until you've got yourself settled in, but there is a very definite limit to what I can do; and in a day or so, once you're acclimatised-'