May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  “The road is very long,” he said. He talked like that, in the dream.

  “You will know when the time comes to turn left,” she replied.

  “How will I know?”

  “I will be here to tell you.”

  He didn’t look round. “I am glad you will be here with me when the turning comes,” he said.

  “I am always with you,” she said, and he could feel the warmth of her radiance, and the edges of his vision blurred golden from the light that shone from her, and he passed a signpost that said Stoke on Trent 455 miles.

  Oh good, he thought; because when he saw that sign it meant it was the point in the dream where he was allowed to ask one question and still be able to remember the answer when he woke up. It was amazing, the sort of stuff she knew about, and she’d never been wrong yet.

  “SatNav,” he said, “who ate the biscuits?”

  Silence for a while, and then she said, “The one who is to come ate the biscuits, Chris.”

  Oh, he thought. Never wrong yet; but there were some nights when she came over all cryptic, which was only to be expected when you considered that she was just his problem-solving subconscious mind, sublimated into the form of the only entity in the world he really trusted.

  “I do not know who that is,” he said. It was all right to admit stuff like that, in the dream. In real life, of course, women expect you to be bloody telepathic.

  “When the time comes, you will know,” she said. “After six hundred and fifty-four miles, prepare to turn left.”

  Oh no you don’t, he thought; so he asked, “Who is the one who is to come, SatNav?”

  “The one who is to come will unite the children who fell,” she replied. “The one who is to come will lead them along the road they have to travel, taking the third exit at the next roundabout. But you will not remember that when you wake up, because it is still hidden.”

  Oh well, he thought, fair enough. “Why did the one who is to come steal Jill’s biscuits, SatNav?” he persevered, and in front of him the road narrowed, hedges closing in around him like the fingers of a grasping hand.

  “I do not know,” she replied. “Presumably the one who is to come happens to like plain digestives, though personally I prefer Maryland chocolate-chip cookies.”

  For some reason a great surge of joy swept through him as she said that, and he was about to tell her that he liked them too when Karen wriggled, made a noise like a pig and dragged all the bedclothes over to her side, waking him up.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “It’s not really our son of thing,” the manager said, after a long A silence. “No, sorry, I don’t see our customers going for that,” she added, as the tiny genie hovered a few inches above the spout of its lamp, its minuscule fingers dabbing at the keypad of its mobile phone. “I mean, it doesn’t really do anything, does it?”

  Very true, Chris thought. “You get three wishes,” he said cheerfully.

  The manager shook her head. “Not much good for anything, though, are they? Can’t do this, not allowed to do that—”

  “Terms and conditions apply,” he conceded reluctantly. “But it’s very attractively priced, and you can add the upgrade packs, which give you extra wishes, so—”

  “No,” she said firmly. “No, we already do the Imadjinnation range from Zauberwerke, they’re much better, you get six wishes as standard and they can actually do stuff. All yours does is sit there on its little cloud, saying, ‘That option is not available with this product.’ Sorry, but I’ll pass on that one, thanks all the same. What else have you got?”

  “Ah,” Chris said. “Now I know you’re going to love this.” He opened the sample case and took out the book. “The Book of All Human Knowledge, new edition. Always been a strong seller, and now all new with additional—”

  “No.” She cut him off. “Sorry, we had two dozen of them last year, and when the customers got them home and opened them, all the pages were blank. Very embarrassing for us, having to explain—”

  She had a point there, too. Even with the all-new operating system (which he told her about, but she clearly wasn’t impressed) the Book was severely limited by the fact that it only told you what you really needed to know, not what you wanted, or what you thought you needed. If you tried to override the system—by, for example, thinking this isn’t what I wanted to find out about, why hadn’t the stupid thing got an index?—the Book tended to freeze, its pages blank apart from a tiny little black hourglass constantly revolving on the copyright page, just below the ISBN number.

  Chris moved on. “Instaglamour cream,” he said, holding up a small glass jar. “Apply sparingly last thing at night, and in the morning you’re irresistibly beautiful; no-quibble guarantee, lasts up to nine hours, very sensibly priced at—”

  “We stock the Superglamor-Me from Michigan Magical,” she said wearily. “Lasts longer, doesn’t fade in direct sunlight. I’m surprised you’re still bothering with that stuff.”

  He explained that the Instaglamour came in four handy sizes, whereas Superglamor-Me only came in three, and it was the glamour cream of choice of international supermodels such as Ariana Vetterli and—

  “Who?”

  “She’s not so well-known over here,” Chris admitted. “Very big in Monaco, though, and she won’t use anything else. We provide a range of promotional—”

  “Nah. And the same goes for the Silvertongue syrup,” she added. “Doesn’t work. After all,” she went on, a trifle unnecessarily in his opinion, “if it worked, you’d be using it and I’d be buying your stuff.”

  “There’s an ethical code,” he replied weakly. “We’re not allowed—”

  “Is that it, then?” she said, giving him that never-really-expected-anything-from-you look that he’d grown so tired of over the years. “Only I’ve got the Kawaguchiya rep coming in at twelve-thirty—I’m taking him to lunch.”

  Chris managed a smile, somehow or other. “That’s about it for this month,” he said. “Apart, of course, from our very latest new line, which I’ve been saving till last because I just know it’s going to blow your socks off. The JWW BB27K—”

  “Oh, that.” She grinned. “Heard all about it from Susie at the Telford branch. She had a customer, she bought one and parked her car in it, came back half an hour later and the car’d gone. Vanished. Called out the AA, finally got the supernatural breakdown service, the bloke told her it’d fallen through the fabric of space/time into a pocket reality and it’d cost nine hundred quid plus VAT to get it out again. And it was only a cruddy old Fiesta, so it wasn’t worth it. No, you can keep them, I’m not having them in my shop.”

  There was, of course, a perfectly rational explanation in that case, and if the customer had read the instructions properly and checked for ley lines, like the booklet said, it wouldn’t have happened. But he didn’t bother telling her. Waste of breath. “Well,” Chris said, “if you change your mind you’ve got my number. So, shall we just run through the repeat orders?”

  She nodded. “Just the DW6,” she said. “I think we’ll up that from nine dozen to twelve, just in case we get a sudden run. Your delivery people are so slow—”

  Just for a moment he was tempted to ask, but he didn’t. “Right-oh,” he said. “Twelve dozen dried waters, what else can I—?”

  “That’s all,” she said. “See you next month, then.”

  It could’ve been worse, he told himself as he walked back to the car. Could’ve had that bloody trainee with me. Small mercies.

  (Angela the trainee had called in sick; or at least, her mother, who happened to be a personal friend of Mr Burnoz—would’ve been nice if Angela had thought to mention that—had rung him at home to say her daughter had come back a nervous wreck and what was that stupid Chris person thinking of, taking her where there could be demons, it was just a wonder she hadn’t been killed or horribly mutilated, and she was really upset about it... Sometimes small mercies are very small indeed, and come with a side salad of aggravation.)
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  But at least, without her there, he could use the SatNav—

  Chris stopped dead, his hand on the car door handle. Why would he want to use the SatNav when he could find his way from Kettles to Black Country Esoterica blindfold on a dark night in the fog? He let go of the handle as though there might be something infectious on it, and took a step back, nearly treading on the foot of a passing stranger.

  There was that problem. He’d been warned about it, at the sales conference when they’d launched the product: the JWW Queenie (Quasi-Intelligent Navigational Instrument, Queenie; for which some genius in marketing had been paid good money) was the state of the art, a million per cent more accurate and reliable than the Stone Age non-magic version that ran on some kind of radio signal beamed off an American military satellite, but there was a problem. No bother if a few simple precautions were observed, and they’d tweaked the bugs enough to get it to comply with the latest EU regs, but—

  Actually, Chris thought it was more than a little problem, and when they’d told him he could have one he hadn’t been keen. I know my way round my own patch, thank you very much, he’d told them, I certainly don’t need a bloody condemned soul imprisoned in a little plastic box with a set of OS maps to tell me how to get from Wolverhampton to Stafford without going through Birmingham city centre.

  It’s fine, they told him, the wards and containment spells are absolutely watertight and foolproof, there’s absolutely no way the bugger’s getting out of there, you’ve just got to be a tiny bit careful, that’s all. Asked to define “careful” in this context, however, they’d gone ever so slightly vague—treat it with respect, don’t play with it, use a bit of common sense, and other well-meaning but useless advice. Chris had driven for a month like a lorry driver hauling nitroglycerine until Ben Jarrow, who had the south-eastern patch, finally told him what all the fuss was about. Yes, the unit was powered by a living entity, usually a sprite, dryad, water nymph or salamander; invariably, one that had committed some crime against the laws of its community and been given a life sentence. But that was fine, since the wards really did work, otherwise the standards commission would never have signed off on it. The only danger lay in getting—well, Ben had said, looking a little strange, in getting attached to it. What, caught up in the wiring or something? No, Ben said patiently, getting fond of it. Talking to it. Maybe starting to believe it was talking back, having a conversation. But the risk wasn’t worth worrying about, he’d continued, because who in his right mind would start talking to a navigational aid? Only someone who was a bit not quite right in the head, or a really sad bugger—And in any case, he’d added, if you do start to feel like you’re getting caught, all you’ve got to do is turn the radio on, or play a CD, and the spell’s broken. Simple as that.

  You never think it’ll be you. You always reckon you’re too smart, and then it’s too late; you’re hooked, caught, in the shit, and everybody’s giving you sad, sympathetic looks that really mean told you so. So easily done. But, Chris told himself, as he nerved himself to touch the car door again, it’s all right, I caught it in time, I’ll be sensible from now on and it’ll all be fine.

  So he climbed in and sat perfectly still for a moment or so; then he leaned across and reached for the radio. For a split second, his fingers brushed the SatNav’s little rectangular screen, and he felt a sudden urge to press the button; bad, he thought, very bad, and stretched past it until he felt the radio knob click into place. Safe. There, see? Nothing to it, really.

  The radio. The Jeremy Vine show; the daily current affairs phone-in spot. He put up with it for ten minutes, then turned it off, reflecting that if the spirit of the SatNav really was a nasty piece of work suffering eternal damnation for its sins, the only real difference between SatNav and the radio was that Jeremy was getting paid. After that he drove in silence for a bit; then, more through absent-mindedness than anything else, he turned on the CD player.

  That tune again. It really was rather catchy, though Chris couldn’t remember a note of it after it had finished—a point in its favour, since there’s nothing worse than having a song rattling around in your head all day. Distracting, though; which meant the diversion on the outskirts of Walsall took him completely by surprise, and before he could react he’d been swept away by the currents of the traffic and was heading at considerable speed in the wrong direction.

  Sod it, Chris thought, because the country he was being swirled along through was some way off his customary route, and he didn’t know offhand how you got back onto the main dual carriageway, which in any event was closed for resurfacing. Just as well, he told himself, that I’ve got my little friend here. He pressed the button, frowned—something at the back of his mind; no, gone—and waited for—

  “Hello, Chris” she said.

  “Hi. Look, I’m trying to get to—”

  “Walsall,” she said, “but you missed the diversion. Not to worry. Your route is being calculated—please wait.”

  So he waited; and while she was thinking about it, he said, “You missed a bit of excitement yesterday.”

  “Poor Mr Newsome. It must’ve been terrible, finding him like that.”

  “Well, it wasn’t much fun,” Chris replied. “Standing there with that thing sat there looking at me...”

  “I think you were very brave,” she said. “Most people would’ve panicked.”

  “It wasn’t like that, actually,” he replied. “It’s a funny thing, but when something like that happens—I don’t know, maybe it’s the survival instinct suddenly cutting in and taking charge, but I knew exactly what I had to do: keep still and quiet,, no sudden movements, get out of there nice and slowly and don’t break eye contact. Mind you,” he added, “it helped a lot that it’d already had its dinner. I got the impression it simply couldn’t be bothered with me.”

  “It’s true,” she said. “They don’t tend to attack unless they’re hungry or something upsets or annoys them. Most of them, anyway. There are some who kill for the sheer pleasure of it.”

  “Ah well,” Chris said, suddenly anxious to change the subject. “You figured out where we are yet?”

  “At the next roundabout, take the third exit.” Pause; men, “Your apprentice isn’t with you today.”

  Apprentice, he thought; as in The Sorcerer’s. Nice thought. “No, I think she was suffering from a bit of the old delayed shock,” he said. “Handled it pretty well at the time, I thought, but I guess it must’ve got to her later, after she got home.” He overtook a slow tractor, then said, “What do you make of her, then?”

  “Quiet,” she said. “Reserved, a little shy. Perhaps not very keen to be here. And young, of course.”

  Chris nodded. “Stroppy,” he said. “Loads of attitude. Apparently her mum’s an old friend of Dave Burnoz’s, which explains how I got stuck with her.”

  “Rather an honour, don’t you think?” she said. “To choose you to look after his protegee, rather than one of the others.”

  “Nah,” he said, though secretly he was rather taken with the idea. “It’s just that I’m the rep for this area and she lives locally. Also, it’s a rotten job, so naturally it comes my way.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself,” she said soothingly. “I think Mr Burnoz chose you because you’re a good salesman.”

  “And because she lives on my patch.”

  “That too.”

  Chris drove on for a while; she’d got him back on course, on schedule too, so there was no need to rush. It was turning out fine, so he wound the window down a little and savoured the feel of the warm air on his face. Next stop was the Magic Shack—you never knew what sort of business you’d do there, could be a substantial order, could be nothing. He made a resolution to be positive. He was going to sell them lots and lots of stuff, including (at this point it was necessary to suspend reasonable disbelief) at least four dozen BB27Ks. He had a good feeling about it.

  In the event, entirely justified. Five dozen BB27Ks, with special promotional mater
ial; also two dozen bottomless purses, a gross of Instaglamour cream, two pocket universes and his entire car stock of anti-demon talismans. In fact, the only line he wasn’t able to interest them in was DW6—

  ( “We’ve been meaning to ask you,” said the eager, bespectacled young assistant manager. “This is probably a very silly question, but what’s it actually for?“ So, no sale there—)

  The only slight flaw in an otherwise extremely pleasant call was a return: one NK77B, rejected by a customer as not fit for purpose—

  “But how did she know it’s not working?” Chris asked.

  The assistant manager looked at him. “She tried it. It didn’t work. It’s quite simple, really.”

  Normally he wouldn’t have bothered arguing the toss, but today he decided to give it a go, just for the hell of it. “But it’s such a subjective thing, isn’t it?” he said, smiling insidiously. “I mean, a mirror of desire, shows you what you really want. What did she actually see in it?”

  The assistant manager grinned. “She saw herself looking into a mirror of desire that worked properly,” he replied.

  “Oh.”

  So Chris had taken it back, all neatly packed away in its carton, and thrown it on the back seat along with all the other junk that had come to rest there over the years. Annoying, but not his fault. He started the engine and drove away.

  He hadn’t gone far when he hit the diversion again, but not to worry; he leant across and pressed SatNav’s on switch. Nothing happened.

  He swore, jerking the wheel, and the car swerved alarmingly. He pulled himself together, straightened up, made himself concentrate on the road. Chill, Chris told himself, it’s just something broken, that’s all. But that didn’t work, because it wasn’t an it, it was a she, a living creature shut up in a plastic box. Warm day; maybe the poor thing was suffocating in there. Anxiously he scanned the road ahead, and was enormously relieved to see a lay-by, not far off. He pulled in, switched off the engine, unbuckled his seat belt and leaned forward—