by Tom Holt
They arrived much sooner than he’d expected: a fleet of white vans, a couple of marked police cars, and suddenly he was being talked at by half a dozen people at once, all of them asking the same things, none of them appearing to listen to a word he said. They took no notice of the girl; she sat still and quiet for a long time, then got out a book and began to read.
“It was shortish, sort of a grey colour, with a big head,” Chris said, for the sixth or seventh time, “and it just sat there on the shelf, grinning at me.”
The man frowned, as if that made no sense at all. “Do you know if it was armed? Had it got a weapon of any kind?”
“Yes, I told that other man just now, it had a big sort of knife thing, I think it stole it from the shop—”
“Do you think the weapon might have come from the shop? They’re listed as specialising in enchanted arms and armour.”
Chris sighed. “You know what, it’s a distinct possibility, now you come to mention it. Never would have occurred to me, but—”
The man was tapping something into a laptop resting on the car roof. “You’d better give me your full name, address, date of birth—”
It occurred to Chris that unless he did something, this might very well continue for the rest of his life. “Just out of interest,” he said, “do you know someone called Jill Ettin-Smith? She works in your department, and—”
The man looked up from his screen. “You know Jill?”
He nodded. “We were at school together.”
“Oh.” The man snapped his laptop shut. “Oh, right. Actually, she should be along any minute.”
“Really? SmaU world.”
“Not really. She’s the head of this department.”
Chris was surprised, and impressed. Jill talked about work a lot, sure, but very little (now he came to think about it) about what she actually did there; whether she was important or not, stuff like that. Part of him felt slightly ashamed at being surprised. The rest of him couldn’t quite come to terms with someone who’d copied off him in maths at age twelve being put in charge of anything.
He didn’t see her, though. They stopped asking him questions, piled back into their vans and drove away, and he assumed she must’ve gone straight to the shop, which was fair enough (though surely there was very little chance that it would still be there, after all this time). And it stood to reason, it was a serious business and she was a professional, not to mention a head of department, serious management, she wouldn’t have time to stop off and pass the time of day with an old school friend, even though he’d obviously just had the shock of his life and could’ve done with the reassurance of a familiar face—
“Right,” Chris said, rather loudly, “that’s that, we’d better get on and do some work, especially since we probably won’t be getting any orders from DCM any time soon. Pity, I was pretty sure I’d be able to get shot of three dozen TR77Bs on them.”
The girl gave him a look that’d have annoyed him under other circumstances, but after all the fuss and aggravation she was the least of his problems. He asked her for the map and pretended to study it while he pulled himself together.
“Now then,” he said, “Sedgely’s.”
Not the first time he’d come across that smell.
The first time, many years ago but still crisp and sharp in his mind, lodged there like shrapnel from some old war; no bother most days, but gradually moving inwards, always gently pressing on the nerve. The stupid thing was, he should have missed it; he had no business being in there when it happened, he was breaking about a dozen school rules, and for what? Just some stupid dare.
It had all been Benny’s fault; Chris had told them all, the headmaster, the girl’s parents, the men from the government. Benny had dared him to spend the whole lunch break hiding in a cubicle of the girls’ toilets—why this was important to Benny, he had no idea and it hadn’t occurred to him to ask. Foot soldiers don’t ask the field marshal what he wants the stupid hill for. He’d been given his orders, and that was that.
The first twenty minutes had been really rather dull. He’d heard cubicle doors closing, the occasional whoosh of plumbing, nothing particularly titillating or suggestive of the hidden mysteries of biological otherness. He’d been wishing he’d brought his maths homework to be getting on with when he heard voices he recognised, and froze. Karen Hitchins was asking Jill Ettin-Smith if she could borrow her RE notes. He didn’t really give a damn about Karen Hitchins’s opinion of him, but Jill was another matter entirely. She had the knack of being disappointed in people; the look that said, I thought you were different. Worse than detention. Chris concentrated on keeping perfectly still and breathing very quietly.
A third voice; well, they always go around in threes, don’t they? He couldn’t make out who it was, so he consulted his mental database of school political alliances. Karen and Jill used to go around with Amelia Morris, but earlier that term Amelia had defected to the cool gang, and Ellie Kranz had been co-opted to replace her. Five would get you one, therefore, that the third voice was that of Ellie, about whom he knew nothing and cared less—
Then the smell. Because it was all flowery and sweet, Chris had assumed it was some kind of toiletry or cosmetic; from its intensity, he guessed someone had just spilt the bottle. The conversation stopped abruptly—he’d felt a cramp of fear in his stomach; had they seen the toes of his palpably masculine shoes through the gap under the door? And then the scream.
Some years later, when he’d moved in with Karen Hitchins, he’d tried to ask her what she’d seen, what had actually happened, but she’d pretended she hadn’t heard the question, and he knew better than to mention the subject ever again. Jill had only told him what she’d told the government people: a demon had appeared out of nowhere, killed poor Ellie, ripped her head off her shoulders and vanished, taking the head with it—And afterwards, when his parents collected him from the school, and he’d worked so hard to find the words to tell them: Jill Ettin-Smith said it was a demon, like from Hell, and I know it sounds stupid but I believe her, I think demons must be real. And they’d looked at each other, and then at him, and his dad had said, we believe you, son, we know they’re real, listen—
—Which was how Chris had come to learn about the reality of magic, the existence of sorcerers and demons, and what Grandpa had really done for a living, and how these things ran in families, and for all they knew he might have it too. Which had turned out to be the case; though, according to the government people who did the tests, he was little better than borderline, no real chance of him ever being able to practise professionally, even if he went to university and did the degree course; certainly no scholarship, which he’d have to have, since you couldn’t get a student loan for thaumaturgical studies. And that was that, which was why he now carried the bag for JWW Retail, as close as he’d ever get to the real thing—
Maybe because Chris was still in shock and therefore not really trying, he managed to shift a phenomenal amount of stuff off on Sedgely’s, including four dozen BB27Ks with display materials and a dumpbin. He thanked them automatically, wrote the order up in the book and drifted back to the car.
“Might as well stop for lunch now,” he heard himself say. “There’s a pub on our way to Milford & Shale’s, miserable place but it means we won’t have to go out of our way. All right by you?”
“OK.”
Miserable, as it turned out, was putting it mildly. The landlord made them feel about as welcome as a notifiable disease, the food took half an hour to arrive and even the pub cat wouldn’t touch the sausages. That, as far as Chris was concerned, was just fine. It wasn’t really a happy day, and anything nice or fun would’ve seemed faintly grotesque.
“I don’t know the exact figures,” he was saying, replying to the girl’s question. “There’s more of them about than you’d think, but not enough to be a real problem. We keep the lid on it pretty well, which is why you don’t see anything about them on the telly. Actually, an attack’s genera
lly quite good for business. We sell quite a few demon-related products: early warning alarms, liquid demon-repellant, pepper sprays—”
“Pepper sprays?”
Chris nodded. “Didn’t you know, they’re an endangered species? Though not nearly endangered enough, if you ask me. Still, there it is. You and I can’t go around knocking them off, it’s got to be done by trained authorised personnel. So, yes, pepper sprays. They tell me nothing pisses a demon off quite as thoroughly as a face full of pepper, but that’s the law.”
“Oh,” Angela said. “That’s stupid.”
He shrugged. “Not up to me,” he said. “Also, to be fair, they’re bloody hard to kill. Friend of mine works for the department—you know, those comedians we met back there—and apparently you need very specialised kit, not the sort of thing that fits neatly in your handbag or jacket pocket. Anyhow,” he added, as she started to ask another question, “let’s not talk about it any more, if you don’t mind. All right?”
She shrugged too but he could see that she wasn’t happy. “If you like,” she said.
“Thanks. So,” Chris went on, taking a deep breath, “apart from that, how are you finding it?”
“What?”
“The business. The thrill of the open road, the challenge of hand-to-hand marketing. About what you’d expected?”
Another shrug. “More or less,” Angela said. “Though really it’s not about, well, magic, is it? You might as well be selling envelopes or toilet rolls.”
“Yes,” Chris said. “Except I wouldn’t be, because all that stuff’s done by technology now, electronic point of sale reordering and centralised buying. But this is an old-fashioned business, so they still need reps. Which is just as well for me, really.”
“I suppose.” Angela looked away, then down at her fingernails, which were bitten short. “Anyway, I get the general idea. You go round the shops and try and get them to buy stuff. That’s about it, isn’t it?”
“Broadly speaking.” Chris offered a corner of his fried-bread crust to the cat; it stared at him, yowled and ran away. “Still, it’s as close to the interesting stuff as I’ll ever get. Not like you, with your high-powered research.”
“Actually, it’s mostly pretty boring,” Angela replied. “I mean, when I was a kid I thought it’d be all invisibility cloaks and turning people into frogs, but it’s not like that. Really, the only difference between what I’m doing and ordinary physics and chemistry is that there’s a little chip of Knowing Stone inside my calculator instead of silicon, so it doesn’t need batteries.”
Chris nodded. “We sell those,” he said. “They’re not very reliable, though. Drop them or leave them out in the sun and they’re knackered.”
All in all, a long, fraught day. Karen was out when Chris got home, so he defrosted a pizza and sat down in front of the telly. Nothing on the news about the grisly murder of a shopkeeper in the West Midlands, so maybe he’d imagined it after all.
He was halfway through his pizza when the phone rang. “Chris?”
There was an edge to her voice, but he could understand that. “Hi, Jill. How did you get on with the—?”
“Did you open my carrier bag before you gave it back?”
He jumped, as though the phone had bitten his ear. “What? No, of course—”
“There was a sealed packet of biscuits in there and now there’s just a wrapper.”
So the day hadn’t finished with him quite yet. “Was there?”
“Yes.”
Chris hesitated. “I guess Karen must’ve eaten them. I left the bag on the kitchen table. She must’ve wandered down in the night and—”
“They were plain digestives. She hates plain digestives.”
“Does she?”
“Yes.” Less than friendly tsk noise. “I know that for a fact, Chris, she was my best friend at school, remember?”
And he, Karen’s long-term significant other, hadn’t got a clue what sort of biscuits she did and didn’t like (but Jill, he happened to know, adored chocolate hobnobs). “Is that right?” he said. “I never—”
“Which means,” Jill continued grimly, “she wouldn’t have eaten them. But somebody did.”
He really wasn’t in the mood for anything like this. “Look, for crying out loud, Jill, I’ll buy you another damn packet of biscuits, all right? But for the record, I didn’t eat—”
“I don’t care about the biscuits, I want to know if you looked in the bag. Well, I know you did,” she went on (had he ever heard her this angry before? Not as far as he could remember), “what I need to know is exactly what you did.”
This is silly, Chris thought. Jill and her stupid bloody carrier bags. “All right,” he said, “I may have just glanced inside it quickly, as I was putting it down on the—”
“You just looked. You didn’t take anything out.”
“No.”
“You mean, no apart from the biscuits.”
From silly to annoying; evolution in action. “I didn’t touch the fucking biscuits. I don’t like plain digestives either. Just as soon eat plywood. And no, I didn’t touch anything in the stupid bag, all right?”
Silence at the other end. Anybody else and he’d have construed it as sulking, only Jill never sulked. Mind you, Jill never freaked out about anything as trivial as biscuit theft, either. But when she spoke again, her voice was different. Not less agitated, but clearer in her mind, maybe. “All right,” she said, “if you’re absolutely sure.”
“Yes.”
“Fine. That’s all I needed to know.” Pause. “You haven’t got a cat or a dog or anything like that, have you?”
“You know we haven’t, Jill, because of Karen’s asthma.”
“Yes, of course. Mice? Rats?”
“No.”
And this time—well, not relief, but the lowering of tension that comes with a mystery solved, even if the solution is unpalatable. “So, you really have no idea what could’ve eaten the biscuits?”
“No.” As Chris said it, he frowned, and the question formed in his mind; so, if it wasn’t Karen, who the hell did eat the—?
“OK. Thanks for clearing that up.” But I didn’t, he thought; there’s been something weird going on, and I can’t account for it. “Sorry if I came across a bit nasty—I didn’t mean to bite your head off.”
Pause. Freudian slip, if that was the term he was looking for. At any rate, it could be taken as a perfectly valid explanation for Jill stressing out like that. “Talking of which,” he said, his voice a little higher and falsely cheerful, “did you find the—well, the thingummy that did in poor Mr Newsome?”
“No.” Definitely not happy about that. “By the time we got there, the trail had gone cold. We even tried scrying in water, but it knew what it was doing, covered its tracks very well.” Long pause, then: “Is Karen there?”
“No, she’s out.”
“When you see her, maybe it’d be better not to talk about it,” Jill said, sounding much more like herself. “Because of—well, you know, what happened. I happen to know it’s a very sore subject with her, she can get a bit extreme about it, and if she gets the idea there’s one on the loose out there, it could mess her up a bit. So, keep quiet about it, will you?”
“Sure,” Chris replied without thinking, mostly relieved because Jill was back to normal. “And there’s no reason why the subject should come up, we’re not exactly a had-a-nice-day-at-the-office-dear kind of household.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Look, about your biscuits, I’ll get you another—”
“Forget about it,” Jill replied, and she sounded quite normal. “Actually, your poltergeist or whatever it was probably did me a favour, I really can’t afford to go stuffing my face with biscuits unless I want to end up looking like a small whale.”
End of conversation. Chris put the phone down, then looked at it for a few seconds, as though he suspected it of playing games with him. Yes, all right, post-traumatic stress syndrome or whatever the medical term was, maybe
Jill was a little bit off her head tonight because of what she’d seen at the shop. But that still left the problem of what had munched its way through an entire packet of digestive biscuits, and the more he thought about that, the stranger it became. Furthermore, now he came to think of it, the unidentified muncher had eaten all the biccies and then put the wrapper back in the bag. Karen wouldn’t have done that, she’d have binned it, no doubt breathing a heavy sigh as she did so because it was non-recyclable, and it’d have had to have been a fairly sophisticated mouse—
Under other circumstances, if he’d had a problem like that, he’d have phoned Jill; who’d either have explained it away in ten seconds flat, or told him not to be so stupid as to worry about it. Option not available. Chris sat down with his half a cold pizza on his lap, and tried to rationalise it, but his mind kept slipping off it, as though it had been waxed.
Karen, got home just after ten; in a foul mood, overtired and overwrought. There’d been a screw-up at work, she explained, and she’d had to stay on and sort it all out in time for the meeting tomorrow. Chris didn’t ask for details and she didn’t offer them. He heard her slamming cabinet doors in the bathroom as he closed his eyes and went to sleep.
He had the dream again. Not that he minded. It was a nice dream, his favourite.
He was in the car, somewhere in Staffordshire, although the view through the window was of mountains, their sides covered in an endless sea of pine trees, shimmering faintly grey in the summer heat. Sitting beside him, she’d just said, “At the end of the road, turn left,” though the road went on, straight as an arrow, as far as the eye could see.
