by Tom Holt
Fine. Ten minutes or so later, the difficulty had evaporated, though Chris knew it hadn’t really gone away. Rather, Jill had filed and stored it, and sooner or later an answer would be forthcoming. He noted with approval that at no point had she said, “Well, why the hell don’t you ask someone, it’s your stupid firm that makes the stupid stuff,” or words to that effect. She understood perfectly why that simply wasn’t an option; though of course, if she was a sales rep for JWW Retail, it’d have been the first thing she’d have done. As for that cursory What? Oh, fine, he was prepared to take it at face value; not because he wasn’t interested. Quite the opposite. One of these days, he’d get an answer to that question that he knew he wasn’t going to like. The longer that particular experience could be postponed, the better.
They chatted aimlessly for a while after that, and Chris managed to keep the conversation away from any more danger areas, though it was touch and go a few times; the nastiest moment was when Jill started complaining about how she’d been putting on weight again (and, since she’d raised the subject, it was perfectly true; but he knew it didn’t signify, since she had one of those Stock Exchange metabolisms—massive gains one week, huge losses the next—and so long as she kept two sets of clothes, one in size zero and the other in extra-large, he couldn’t see how it could possibly matter to a rational human being... In the event, he deflected her away from all that by asking her about the demon-hunting business; it wasn’t something he liked being told about, but it was better than a detailed analysis of her latest diet.
“We really need to find out how they’re getting through,” Jill was saying. “Until we know a lot more about that, it’s really just guesswork and how quickly we can react once an infestation’s been reported to us. There’s theories, of course, but none of them seem to hold up once you try applying them in practice. For example, there was this article in New Thaumaturgical Quarterly about quantum fluctuations in the Earth’s metadimensional field—”
“Is that right?” Chris said hopelessly. “I didn’t even know we had a—”
“Which,” Jill ground on, “may give rise to anomalous cross-field events which the demons could’ve evolved to exploit, sort of like cracks, or bubbles. But it’s all a bit vague and theoretical, if you ask me. I still prefer the hypothesis put forward by Kanamoto and Van Spee in 1846, which seeks to explain demon incursions in terms of artificially induced Otherspace interfaces, presupposing a negatively charged ionic curtain existing somewhere in the D6 void—”
In other words, white noise, which Chris had long since learned to tune out; it was soothing, when you were sitting in a pleasant pub holding a full glass, and basically he just liked hearing the sound of her voice: eager, earnest, clever, friendly, safe; not asking him to understand, let alone agree or form an opinion. It wasn’t like when Karen talked at him, when there was always a very real threat that there’d be a test afterwards, or a sudden silence which he was supposed to fill with exactly the right form of sympathetic reassurance. Most of all, he liked being talked at by Jill because she never ever talked about Us; though the downside of that was that there wasn’t an Us for them to talk about But, he felt sure, even if there had been (if only—), she’d never have dreamed of talking about it. He couldn’t imagine her doing such a thing. To the best of his knowledge, in all the years he’d known her she’d never been half of any kind of an Us. She belonged to too many people, he supposed, too many friends all relying on her to listen and understand. A greater Us, of which she was the coordinator and historian. For a moment he felt a stab of jealousy, but it didn’t take long for it to pass.
Closing time swooped down too soon; Chris said goodnight and walked home. It was only as he unlocked the door, shoving the thing he’d been carrying in his right hand under his arm so he could get out his keys, that he realised he’d picked up her bag by mistake. Ever since he’d known Jill, she’d always had a carrier bag; Tesco or Safeway in the early days, upgraded to M&S once she left school and started earning; these days, now that she was affluent and successful, it’d be something black or burgundy with gold lettering on it, but still a plastic carrier, her trade mark. What she carried in her carriers had always been something of a mystery, since she packed her vital instruments—purse, phone, glamour-repair kit and the like—in a conventional handbag, usually of great elegance and splendour. But she also, had the knack of frustrating curiosity without even seeming to try; the carrier always came to rest between her feet, or wedged between her thigh and the side of the chair, safe from surreptitious investigation. But not, apparently, this time.
Chris paused, standing in the hall by the cheap Ikea phone table, and tried to reconstruct the sequence of events. Jill had stood up; the carrier had been in her hand, but she’d rested it on the table while she’d put on her coat; he’d picked it up to give it to her, but then she’d dropped her handbag, and by the time she’d retrieved that they’d been talking about something—Izzy Bowden’s divorce, he recalled—and then someone had nearly barged into them and they’d been preoccupied with taking evasive action; and they’d walked out of the pub together, and he’d still been holding the carrier—
Chris went into the kitchen and sat down. A square of spilt milk on the worktop told him that Karen was home—she had an unfortunate tendency to attack cardboard milk cartons with wild enthusiasm and knives, which meant milk went everywhere when she poured—but he couldn’t hear her crashing about and she hadn’t called out when he opened the door, so presumably she’d already gone to bed. He put the carrier bag down on the kitchen table and looked at it, torn apart by opposing forces of extraordinary power.
On the one hand: anybody who took advantage of an honest mistake to go snooping about in other people’s private carrier bags was obviously lower than a basement, and even the thought of doing such a thing made Chris shudder. The honourable course of action would be to seal the top with parcel tape and quickly leave a message on her answerphone to say he’d got it. On the other hand—
As the debate raged inside him, Chris examined the outside of the bag. It was dark navy blue, with Shotwell & Hogue written on it in curly gold italics. He knew them, of course. They were on his patch; good customers, in fact they’d taken a dozen BB27Ks purely on his unsupported recommendation. Somehow, that tipped the balance (he had absolutely no idea why). Feeling like someone robbing his child’s piggy bank to get money for drugs, he gently opened the bag and peered inside.
Something of an anticlimax. Inside the bag Chris saw a paperback book (something by Alan Titchmarsh entirely unrelated to gardening), a packet of plain digestive biscuits, a baseball cap with the letters DS on the front and a pair of black patent shoes. He frowned, feeling let down and betrayed as well as guilty. It was a bit much, he felt, to have sold his soul and forfeited his honour for this collection of old tat.
The phone rang. Chris let go of the bag and lunged back into the hall, to shut the stupid thing up before it woke Karen.
“Chris?” It was Jill.
He scowled. “Yes, I’ve got it,” he said. “Your blasted bag. And before you ask,” he added, “no, I haven’t looked inside it. It must’ve been when you were putting on your coat, I suppose I—”
“That’s OK,” Jill said; and it wasn’t just his imagination, she did sound relieved. “I was just worried I’d left it in the pub, that’s all. Look, is there any chance you can drop it round at my place on your way tomorrow morning? Only—”
“Sorry,” Chris said, “not really. I’ve got to pick up that bloody trainee at six-fifteen, remember. Which reminds me,” he added. “Must remember to set the alarm.”
“You could leave it in the porch” Jill said. “Or ring the bell and I’ll pop down.”
Chris felt his eyebrow hitch. “At half past five in the morning?”
“I’ll be up, I expect,” she replied, in a voice he couldn’t immediately analyse. A pause; men, “It’s just that strictly speaking we’re not supposed to take confidential stuff out of the
office, and the new manager gets quite stressy about that sort of thing. I don’t want to give him an excuse to have a go at me.”
“Fine, no problem,” Chris replied, as he thought: Confidential stuff? Would that be the top secret paperback or the For-Your-Feet-Only slingbacks? “I’ll drop it off, then.”
“Thanks.” Again, the relief. “Just ring the bell, don’t wait for me. Sorry to have bothered you.”
As Chris returned to the kitchen to pick up the bag and put it in the hall where he wouldn’t forget it, the criminal urge came back. After all, Jill wouldn’t know if he took just one more peek, and somehow the fact that she’d lied (confidential stuff, mustn’t leave the office; yeah, right) made it seem tantalisingly easy. This time, though, he fought it back, and that made him feel rather proud—she’d lied, he’d resisted temptation, so he’d managed to fight his way back to the moral high ground, which is always nice. He turned off the lights and went to bed.
The blue Shotwell & Hogue carrier bag waited until it was quite safe—the humans were making loud respiratory noises, indicating deep sleep—then stirred, its thin plastic fabric shivering like the shell of a hatching egg. If anybody had been there to see, he’d have had a frustrating time of it, because as the bag shivered it sucked in darkness from the surrounding shadows, a useful trick well known to its kind. When it felt dark enough to be safe, it shook itself like a dog and stood up, the plastic stretching and moulding itself into a new shape: humanoid but short, bow-legged, crouching. It took a step forward, leaving the cap, the shoes, the book and the empty biscuit wrapper (it had been peckish) lying on the carpet. Treading carefully, it stepped over them and walked silently through the hall into the kitchen, following the human’s scent trail. It found nothing of great interest there, though it did pause to lap up the few drops of spilt milk, and went on into the sitting room, where it rubbed itself against the television screen, happily absorbing the static electricity, pulled out the plug and licked the brass prongs. A few sights and smells there, but nothing it could really use; the good stuff had faded, dried up so that it tasted dusty and bitter, all the nourishment desiccated out of it. A pity: if it had been there a week earlier it could’ve had a feast. It yawned and stretched; then, taking extra care not to make a sound, it gently nudged open the bedroom door and peered round it, to stare at the two humans asleep in the dark.
CHAPTER TWO
There were two women on his shoulders, one beautiful and nice, one ugly and nasty, and as he approached the end of the road, they were both yelling at him: turn left, urged the nice one, turn right, said the nasty one, and he wished they’d both shut up so he could think. And the junction was getting closer and closer, but instead of slowing down he was speeding up, towards the brick wall, so unless he decided which way to turn right now, he was going to crash and die—
The noise wasn’t screaming brakes after all; it was the alarm clock. He shot out a hand, knocked it over, groped, grabbed it, erupted out of bed and ran, his thumb still searching for the stupid little button that turned the stupid thing off...
Safely into the kitchen, and Chris was fairly sure that he’d made it without waking Karen up. She was, he supposed, a nice enough person really,—but if her sleep was disturbed she turned into a monstrous clawed snarling thing, and stayed that way the rest of the day. He flopped down in a chair, put the clock on the table and caught his breath. Then, very carefully, he sneaked back into the bedroom and got his clothes.
A quarter past five in the fucking morning. Chris didn’t have time for breakfast, or even to boil a kettle, but his mouth was sticky and foul and he desperately needed caffeine in some form; he caught sight of the coffee pot, picked it up and felt a certain amount of liquid shifting around inside it. Last night’s coffee, cold and full of grounds. He put the spout to his mouth, tilted the pot and glugged thrice. Disgusting, but better than nothing. I am not a morning person, Chris admitted to himself as he tried to remember how to tie shoelaces. On the other hand, this isn’t the morning, it’s the middle of the fucking night. Therefore, I am in my element, on the top of my form, one hundred per cent functional and ready for anything. Right, then, let’s go.
The car purred into life with a tickle of the key, revoltingly happy, like a dog being taken for a walk. Chris had remembered the stupid carrier bag, or at least tripped over it in the hall (he remembered how he’d violated it last night; in the brain-bleaching banality of early morning, he wondered why the hell it had seemed like such a big deal) and set his course accordingly.
Jill lived in one of those interesting old industrial buildings convened into flats, right at the very top; she’d told him about it once, and it had turned out to be rather less interesting than he’d first thought. There was a glass-and-steel porch with a buzzer-box. He pressed her number, put the carrier down, and—
Someone had eaten the biscuits. Chris frowned.
Was I drunk last night? he wondered. Couldn’t remember; which argued that he had been, but the absence of hangover proved conclusively that he hadn’t. Karen, then. It was possible, she’d been known to get up in the middle of the night and eat things.
Embarrassing, but too late to do anything about it now. Chris glanced at his watch; running late, needless to say. He really didn’t want to concede the moral high ground to the thin trainee by keeping her waiting. He hopped back into the car and put his foot down.
She was there when he pulled in, the only living creature in the car park. He opened the door, and she got in.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, “only I had to—”
“ ‘Salright.”
Ah, he thought, yet another one who won’t let me finish a sentence. Just what I needed, really.
She was red-haired and pale, with a nose and chin that looked as though they’d just emerged from a pencil sharpener, and she seemed to be huddling inside her clothes as though trying to minimise the contact between the hated fabric and her skin. Not that Chris could blame her; ten to one her mother had chosen the suit for her (first impressions are so important, dear; if that was how it had been, Mummy had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams, though someone should have told her that not all impressions are good). It made the girl look like a prisoner of war, captured in some particularly bloody engagement between two opposing armies of chartered accountants. Well, Chris thought, fine: she doesn’t want to be here, I don’t want her here; in a reasonably logical world, we’d do a deal. I’d drop her off wherever she wanted to go, we’d both pretend she’d done the rounds with me, and both of us would have a marginally less excruciating day. But it doesn’t work like that, does it?
“So,” he said cheerfully.
The trainee was staring through the windscreen at some indefinite distant point.
“So,” he repeated. “You’re Angela.”
She didn’t look round, but maybe her mouth tightened just a little.
“I’m Chris,” he ground on.
“Hello.”
“And you’re doing the graduate-intake initiative.”
“ ‘Sright.”
They tell you, practically from the cradle, that Man is a social animal, loneliness is a truly terrible thing, and humans can really only be happy in the company of their fellow creatures. Shocking, the way they’re allowed to lie to you like that. “That’s where the firm pays for your college tuition and stuff, and in return you come and work for us afterwards.”
“Mm.”
Well, Chris thought, at least she’s not one of those terrible gabby females who won’t ever shut up. Indeed. Quite the bloody opposite. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’d better fill you in on what we’re going to be doing today. First we’ll be calling on Cotterells, they’re what we call a typical mum-and-dad independent; there’s quite a lot of them still, though the big foreign multiples are just starting to get established over here, Zauberwerke and Boutiques de Magie and Sorcery Source; but they’re still only, what, fifteen per cent of the overall sector as a whole—”
�
��I know all that,” Angela said, each word an effort, like digging coal. “I’m doing my dissertation on the structure of the magical retail trade, so you don’t need to tell me.”
A very faint emphasis on the ‘you’. Well, that was fine, too. “A dissertation,” Chris replied. “Fancy. That must be a lot of hard work.”
“Mm.”
OK, Chris said to himself, let’s not talk. Let’s sit here in stony silence, me driving, you hating the whole of Creation. He drove, therefore, for a quarter of an hour, allowing his mind to drift. Bloody Burnoz, he thought, lumbering me like this. And what’s it going to be like at the shops? Fat chance I’ll have to do any selling with this millstone round my neck. How am I supposed to do my job with—?
He realised he didn’t have the faintest idea where he was. Silly: he drove these roads for a living, he knew every alley, lane and byway—except this one, he admitted. Must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.
Um, Chris thought.
Under normal circumstances (in which, of course, this wouldn’t have happened to begin with) he’d just flip on SatNav and she’d have him out of there and back on the straight and narrow in a minute or two. For some reason, though, he really didn’t want to use SatNav while the miserable girl was in the car; as if she wouldn’t understand, as if it’d somehow be inappropriate, like snogging in the office. He looked in the mirror, then straight ahead, just in case he’d missed some obvious landmark he could triangulate by. No such luck.
“Urn,” he said. “You wouldn’t mind just getting that map off the back seat, would you?”
Angela turned her head and looked at him. “Why don’t you use your GPS?”
It was a moment before Chris realised what she was talking about. “Oh, that,” he said. “Bust Doesn’t work. Been meaning to get a new one.”
(Forgive me, he thought; but it was switched off, and couldn’t absolve him.)
