by Tom Holt
“In case you’re wondering how you got here,” he went on, “we teleported you out of the entertainment venue using a depolarised actyon beam. There should be no significant lasting effects, though you might care to redo your manicure at some point.”
Instinctively, Lucy glanced down at her hands, which were clamped to the arms of a chair with centimetre-thick bands of clear plastic. The varnish, she noted, was peeling off her nails in fat spirals. Also, she appeared to have acquired a sixth finger on her left hand.
“Don’t worry about that: it’ll wear off,” the Section Chief said. “Truth is, we never beamed one of your lot before. Closest thing in the database was a Snaktigern’s lemur, so we used that as a pattern and sort of fiddled it a bit. But your original configuration will reassert itself in the next hour or so. The tail will probably just drop off of its own accord.”
A window opened in thin air and a smiling young man in a Venturicorp baseball cap materialised in the usual way. He was holding a clear plastic tray on which rested a glass of milk. “Nutmeg sprinkles?” he asked.
Lucy ignored him. “Who are you? What have you done to me?”
The Section Chief contorted his lower mandible in a manner that somehow, in spite of the total lack of a shared frame of reference, still managed to indicate reassurance. “Now I’ve got to do the official bit, but don’t worry; it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. Now, then. You have the right to remain silent, but anything you do say will be taken down in analog form and cynically twisted to mean what we want it to. You have a right to an attorney, but trust me, you’re in enough trouble already without getting involved with one of those bloodsuckers. Now, please indicate that you understand what I’ve just told you by saying the word guilty.”
“Huh?”
“Close enough.” A semi-translucent membrane flicked to and fro across the lens of the Section Chief’s lower middle eye, conveying sheepish regret. “You’re in the Marshalsea,” he said. “But don’t worry; you’re just being held here until you’re tried and found guilty, which means you’re allowed to have something to read.” He scraped two claws together, and a Kindle appeared in mid-air, hovering six inches from the tip of Lucy’s nose. “When you’ve finished a page just say turn. Ciao for now.”
A window opened in nothing at all. The Section Chief scuttled through it and vanished. Lucy looked at the Kindle. Clouds of Glory: The Authorised Biography of Ab and Snib Venturi. Fantastic.
Taking care not to make any sound that the Kindle might mistake for a request, Lucy closed her eyes and tried to remember everything she’d picked up about the Marshalsea. She knew it was where you got sent if you didn’t pay your sin bill. Time, she recalled, doesn’t pass there; you don’t get older because the Venturis reckon it’s cruel and unusual for someone to rot in jail while their life drains away, and there’s nothing to see or do, you don’t need to eat, drink or use the lavatory, you’re tied to a chair for your own personal safety and there you stay until your bill is paid. Because your metabolism is effectively frozen, you don’t get tired and so you don’t sleep. There are no days to cross off because there are no days. At the insistence of Venturicorp’s insurers, your health and well-being are guaranteed, so you can’t die. You can breathe or not, as you wish. You just sit there until enough money changes hands and you’re at liberty to go, with your youth and health intact and a free bumper sticker, Marshalsea sweatshirt and souvenir pen. Or, if there’s nobody to pay for you or they can’t afford it, you just sit there.
Tried and found guilty. That didn’t sound very Venturi. It suggested that what she’d done—hanging around with that imbecile Jersey, presumably—fell under a different jurisdiction than all the usual terrestrial sins, for which the penalty was an on-the-spot fine and no messing about with empty forms of justice. Treason? Blasphemy? Something that meant they couldn’t just decide her fate and throw away the key without at least appearing to give her a chance to defend herself. Something in the contract, perhaps, from when the Venturis bought out the old management? Or some theological equivalent of international law? Not that it mattered terribly much. Tried and found guilty, the Thing had told her. And then?
This can’t be happening to me. You meet someone who’s mildly interesting and all-right-looking (for a short-arse); he starts blethering about going to find Father Christmas because he’s really some ancient Mesopotamian thunder god, and you say you’ll go too, to shut him up—well, other girls go to watch football or motor racing or pretend they like cycling or fishing, on the strict understanding that once matters are put on a more formal footing there’ll be no more of that sort of nonsense, thank you very much—and then he starts getting in fights with the police and you decide that tagging along is maybe not such a good idea after all. And for that you spend the rest of eternity strapped to a chair in a sort of minimalist departure lounge? It can’t actually work like that, can it?
Can it?
There are things you can do. You can close your eyes and try to remember the lyrics of half-forgotten songs, or take a mental tour through every house, school, college campus and office you’ve ever known. You can be the casting director for a film of your life and times, deciding who ought to play you and everybody you’ve ever met. You can analyse your past and attempt to isolate the precise moments when everything started to go wrong. You can think of the questions you’d ask if you got the chance to meet your top twenty fictional characters. You can compile lists of your fifty favourite cheeses. She did all that. It didn’t seem to help very much, so she tried a different approach. She imagined that she’d somehow managed to get out of there, and then she’d found Jersey, and now she was telling him exactly what she thought of him. That must’ve worked because she’d only just got started when some fool popped out of a window in thin air and interrupted her.
Oh for pity’s sake, she thought. “What?” she snapped.
It was a Thing. a different one but unmistakably the same species. “Aren’t you the lucky one?” it said. “You’re going to see the boss.”
“What?”
“You’ve got an appointment. Amazing.” The plastic bands fell off her wrists and ankles. “Come on, let’s be having you. You’ve got forty-five seconds to vacate the cell and then we start charging you rent.”
“See the …?”
“Boss, yes. You’re going to meet your supreme being, face to face. Oh for crying out loud. You people. You’re supposed to be pleased.”
30
it had been, they agreed, a definite falling-off from the last one, definitely darker and with fewer talking robots, but well worth seeing nonetheless. They agreed on these points many times on the way back to the hellmouth, mostly so that they wouldn’t have to talk about other issues, such as where they went next. There came a moment, however, when they were standing at the hellgate turnstile, and either someone was going to say, “Would you like to come back to my place for a coffee?” or someone wasn’t. There was a silence as profound as intergalactic space, and then Jenny said, “Do you think the Hole in the Wall’s still open?”
Genius. “I guess so,” Bernie replied. “Let’s find out.”
It was, and they sat there and talked for ever such a long time, and drank more caffeine than was good for them, and then they both realised they’d have to get a move on or they’d be late for the office. They arrived together, to find a familiar figure sitting on the wooden bench at the back of Reception.
Jersey lifted his head and looked blearily at them. “You two,” he said.
“Sure,” Bernie replied. “What are you doing here?”
Jersey gave him a pitiful look. “That crazy woman in the coffee-bar place pushed me in here,” he said. “Apparently I can’t leave because I need an exit visa, but I can’t go any further than this because I’m not registered. I don’t know. What kind of a place is this?”
“Um,” Bernie said. “Look, don’t worry about a thing, I’ll get you a visa and then you can be on your way.”
“You can do that?”
“Sure. I work here.”
“But you’re human.”
Jenny muttered something about some filing she had to get on with and disappeared through the connecting door.
“Do you want to get out of here or not?”
“I guess so.” Jersey frowned. “Actually, I’m not sure. If I go back up to the world, presumably the Venturis will have me arrested.”
“Well, yes.”
“And I can’t stay in the coffee-shop place, because I don’t think the manager likes me or she wouldn’t have pushed me in here, so I’m not entirely sure where I’m meant to go.” He scratched his head. “You know, this is all getting a bit much, frankly. I think I used to like it better when I was blowing up pyramids.”
“Well, you can’t stay here for ever,” Bernie said briskly. “We’re officially closed to new customers. So, unless your name’s down on the books, which it can’t be, because you didn’t die before the handover, we can’t take you.” A thought struck him. “Not as a resident, anyhow.”
“What do you mean?”
Bernie suppressed a sigh. He had no idea at what point he’d assumed responsibility for this idiot, or why he’d done so, but apparently he had, and there was no getting out of it now. “We employ civilian staff,” he said. “Like me, for instance. If I can get you a job here, you can stay.”
That bewildered look. “A job? Doing what?”
“I don’t know. What can you do?”
“Um.” Jersey gave him a blank look. “I don’t know.”
“Fine. What qualifications have you got?”
“A degree in Egyptology from Harvard. Postgraduate degrees in pre-Columbian languages, Assyrian archaeology, aeronautical engineering and the theory of explosions. Also diplomas in Sanskrit, Oceanic anthropology and quantum theology.”
“Fine,” Bernie said. “In that case, I’ve got just the job for you.”
31
Rather less than an hour later, Jersey had a new job, complete with uniform, and was being trained in various essential new skills.
“You put the bun on the table,” said his instructor. “You put the salad on the bun. You put the burger on the salad. You put the other half of the bun on the burger. There. Now let me see you do it.”
“Like this?”
“Sorta. But the top half of the bun goes on the other way up.”
“Oh I see. Like this?”
The instructor hit him between the shoulder blades so hard his teeth rattled. “You got it,” he said cheerfully. “Finally you got it. You da man.”
“Thank you.”
“What’s your name again?”
“Jersey.”
“That’s a really stupid name.”
“Yes,” Jersey said, “it is.”
Which was fine, as far as it went. During the day he did his job, occasionally catching glimpses of the tourists (humans, mortals, from the real world) over the shoulders of the counter staff. At night, though … He explained his predicament to the manager.
“You’re on the run,” she said, “from the Venturis.”
“That’s right, yes.”
“Oh boy.” She pointed at the floor. “Do they know?”
“Well, Bernie—he’s the man who got me this job—”
“You’re in with Bernie?”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, in that case.” She frowned, then smiled as inspiration struck. “There’s a storage room at the back. It’s where we dump the empty packaging.”
“Yes. And?”
“But you didn’t hear about it from me, OK?”
“Ah.”
You can sleep quite well on squashed cardboard boxes if you’re tired enough, and if you work back-to-back shifts, you’re tired enough all right. And he found he didn’t really mind very much. It had dawned on him that this time he’d probably gone too far. The Venturis weren’t like the usual villains he’d been dodging for so many years. They wouldn’t try and blow him up, dump him at the bottom of snake-filled pits, chain him to the wall of rooms slowly filling with water, all that jazz. Instead, they’d arrest him and put him in a cell in the Marshalsea and leave him there, and that was a different proposition entirely. Compared with that, working in a burger bar and sleeping in a storeroom wasn’t so bad. In fact, he found himself wishing he’d given it a try, or maybe something even more exciting and fulfilling, before he’d got himself into trouble with the omnipotent, omniscient bunch who now ran his planet. If only. Ah well. The important thing was to count his blessings, of which there were one. But a good one nevertheless.
As for Santa Claus and freeing humanity from the tyranny of the Venturi Corporation, he could vaguely remember the passion he’d felt, the urgent need to do something. But that all seemed like a very long time ago, and he was finding it increasingly hard to understand why anyone could possibly think it was worth the risk of annoying the Management and ending up in the Marshalsea, just to … what? Bring an end to a sociological and economic miracle that had improved the lives of billions? How presumptuous could you get? True, people were a bit more miserable, a bit less inclined to joy. He saw it on the faces of customers in the burger bar, heard it in their voices—or rather didn’t hear it because everybody spoke so quietly now. But from time to time they left behind copies of the United World newspaper, which was always packed cover to cover with encouraging statistics about soaring economic growth, increased disposable income, buoyant capital investment, plummeting crime figures. To begin with he hadn’t believed them, because you don’t always take what you read in the paper at face value, especially if there’s only one paper and it’s owned by the United World Government. So he asked his human fellow workers, who lived Topside and had families and lives there. Yes, they said gloomily, it’s all perfectly true. Nobody bothers locking their doors any more and we’ve never had it so good. Then why, he asked, are you all so sad all the time? At which they just shrugged and got on with their work.
He wondered what had become of Lucy. Not that it was any of his business, since she’d made it pretty clear she wasn’t interested, and why should she be? All he’d ever done for her was get her in bad with Venturi security, and why? Because he’d been so dead set on, well, the holly-and-reindeer thing. Stupid. He hoped, very much indeed, that she was OK and the stormtroopers weren’t still after her, but facts had to be faced. She belonged to an earlier phase of his life, the swashbuckling-and-conspiracy-theories bit, which was now quite definitely over and had been replaced with the earning-a-living-and-keeping-his-nose-clean imperative. So be it.
Time passed in a place where time has no meaning. He became an expert at putting the bun on the table, putting the salad on the bun, putting the burger on the salad and putting the other half of the bun on the burger, so much so that he was given the extra responsibility of opening the outers of styrofoam boxes, work that required the skilful manipulation of a small knife. Money was gradually building up in his account at the Bank of the Dead. He was issued with a new baseball cap and narrowly missed out on being named Employee of the Month, but he didn’t mind that because it meant that there was someone else even more dedicated, loyal and hard-working than he was, and that was great for the company, and whatever was great for the company was great for him too. And more time passed, and someone higher up decided he was ready. His dedication, loyalty and hard work were finally recognised and he was promoted to front of store, operating Till 5, coincidentally just when Jolene left to have a baby.
For someone who’d spent so long working exclusively with mince, polystyrene and salad, interacting with people on a regular basis came as something of a shock, but he coped remarkably well, as his high-ranking sponsors had no doubt anticipated. He smiled as he took each order, smiled again as he handed over each tray, and if nobody ever smiled back that wasn’t necessarily a criticism to be taken personally. In fact, everything was shaping up pretty darn well and he was beginning to think his life might just possibly be getting
back on course when …
“Have a nice day,” he said to the customer.
But the customer didn’t move. In fact, the customer was looking at him.
“Have a nice day,” he repeated. He felt uncomfortable. He’d never had to say it twice.
“You Jersey Thorpe?”
You got all sorts in the burger bar. Most of them were human tourists, but sometimes you got staff who felt like a break from canteen food, so a customer with blood-red eyes, pointed ears, teeth like a wild boar and three-inch talons was no big deal. This one was short, squat, muscular, of indeterminate gender and wearing a Hell staff white cotton T-shirt, the one inscribed
I FOUGHT THE LORD
AND
THE LORD WON
“That’s right,” Jersey said. “Can I help you?”
“When does your shift finish?”
“In about half an hour. Is there something I can get for you? Sauces? A coffee stirrer?”
The customer grinned. It was like looking into a very old cave: stalagmites and stalactites. “The jolly man says hello.”
“Excuse me?”
“He wants to see you.”
“I beg your—” But the customer had gone, vanished, if such a thing were possible, into thin air. On the counter, where he’d briefly leaned his massive forearms, lay a small sprig of holly with one red berry.
Fine, Jersey thought, as he worked the rest of his shift. The jolly man wants to see me, but do I want to see him? Come to think of it, no, not really. I don’t do that sort of stuff any more because it gets you in trouble and what does it actually achieve? You find the Ark; they stick it in some warehouse. You beat the bad guys so the good guys can win, and next thing you know the good guys have morphed into the bad guys (see Politics, passim) and don’t you ever feel silly for having helped them gain power? You find out the secret arcane truths, but you can’t tell anyone because the truth is so wacky nobody sane would believe it. Do I really want to get involved? No, I don’t think I do. Different, of course, when there was doubt; then all I wanted was to know. But there’s no doubt any more, and if you want to see angels, all you have to do is drop chewing gum on the pavement and get out your credit card. Maybe that was why everybody was so miserable. When you know the truth, there can, by definition, be no hope. Not that hope is everybody’s friend. Significant, Jersey had always thought, that hope had been in Pandora’s box along with all the other plagues and evils of mankind, and the only thing distinguishing it from the rest was its slowness in climbing out. Hope makes you stumble an extra ten yards in the desert before collapsing; it binds the addict to his needle. It’s the unkindest lie of all. But people seem to need it in order to be happy, and what’s happiness, after all, but a certain penchant for self-deception?
