May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  Which was perfectly true. “Sorry,” Chris said, once he’d fished it out of his mouth. “I was miles away. You see, the government’s taken my SatNav, because of the demon, and they’re going to kill her unless I stop them—”

  Hearing it out loud, together with the stuffed expression on the waitress’s face, had a sobering effect on him; a bit like jumping into a nice hot bath, only to find that someone forgot to turn on the immersion heater. “Only joking,” he said cheerfully. “Can I have some more coffee, please?”

  Probably, Chris told himself (the waitress was looking back at him over her shoulder, presumably in case she was called on to be a witness at some point in the future), it was just as well. In the back of his mind he could hear Ben Jarrow’s soft, bleating voice: can sometimes be a bit of an unhealthy influence, you’d do well to be on the lookout for warning signs. Could it really be happening to him? he wondered; not a comfortable thought But now it seemed like the Day-Glo crowd had solved the problem for him: no more SatNav, no more unhealthy influence. He’d miss her, of course, but if he really was falling under the spell of some kind of malign power... Not that he could bring himself to believe it, but presumably that was how all the victims felt. In which case, he owed Jill and her brightly coloured staff a vote of thanks. Which would be worse, he speculated, being possessed by a dark spirit or eaten by a demon? Both, he decided.

  The more Chris thought about it, the dodgier his recent behaviour seemed to be. Now he came to think of it, he’d actually talked to the horrible machine; worse still, it had talked back to him. Funny how he hadn’t really remembered it before. It had been like a dream, a wispy vague memory that seeps away as you wake up, and half an hour later you can’t recall a single detail. That, surely, was suspicious in itself, implying that the critter in the plastic box was deliberately covering its tracks by doing things to his memory.

  The thought made him shudder so much that he spilt coffee on his knee. Now, though, it was as though the spell had shattered, and he could hear himself talking, chatting with the thing, asking its advice about how to handle the difficult shop managers, moaning to it about the trainee. Even by the fairly relaxed standards of the retail sorcery trade, that was pretty odd behaviour, a man his age with, an imaginary friend. More than that: an imaginary friend with a criminal record, currently doing life for some particularly nasty crime. And maybe—this one made him wince so hard that he nearly knocked over the table—maybe SatNav had something to do with the fact that he couldn’t seem to go more than five miles these days without tripping over demons. After all, if she was a criminal (murder? necromancy?) there was at least a possibility that she was plotting her escape with the demons—while you’re ripping him limb from limb, if you could possibly see your way to cracking open my plastic box, I could just slip away in the confusion and everybody’ll assume I got broken by accident, and they won’t come after me—

  No, even now that the spell was broken Chris couldn’t make himself credit that. Except, of course, that the last thing the demon did before kicking open the door and bolting had been to lean across him and do something with SatNav’s controls. At the time he’d been sure it had switched her off, but maybe he’d got that wrong. He cursed himself for being too chicken to tell Jill about that. It was going to be embarrassing when he spoke to her next and filled in the missing details, which he now knew he had a duty to do since it could possibly explain everything. And, even more important, there was something that SatNav herself had said, he was convinced of it, though he couldn’t actually bring to mind what the exact words had been.

  He gobbled down the rest of his chips, paid the bill and hurried back to the car. Quick check to make sure there weren’t any demons hiding under the road atlas on the back seat, and he set off for home. But with a detour: he stopped off at Enchanted Worlds in Nuneaton, where he was fairly sure they quite liked him, and asked to see a copy of The Book Of All Human Knowledge.

  “It’s a random quality-control check,” he said, and he could see they were impressed. “We’ve been getting reports of defective stock, so naturally—”

  “We haven’t had any problems,” the girl said. “Well, apart from the thickies who don’t read the instructions, but that’s the public for you, we just tell them to—”

  Chris gave her a big buttery smile and waffled for a minute or so about proactive customer support being the backbone of inclusive retailing, and she brought him a copy of the Book. He thanked her and asked if he could take it through into the staffroom for a few minutes. No problem, she said. She even made him a coffee.

  The Book, as so many customers had pointed out, had no index; no need for one, since the Book knew better than you did what you really needed to know. But, for professional-grade users, there was a hidden way in: you folded back the corner of the copyright page, and a menu dropped down. Press show hidden with your thumbnail, and you got a list of options, including Index—

  Chris scrolled down to demons, selected that, scrolled down further to killing and prodded the word with the pad of his index finger. The page went blank, apart from the universally loathed little black hourglass, then filled with print.

  Because they are multilocated in several different dimensions simultaneously, demons are notoriously difficult to kill; furthermore, their highly advanced and adaptive metabolisms allow them to recover almost instantaneously from exceptionally severe wounds, and their skins are impregnated with armour charms. Magic of some sort is almost always necessary, but nearly all the known spells, charms, curses and incantations are species-specific, making positive identification (see appendix 12) an essential preliminary exercise; unfortunately, the speed and ferocity of demon attacks generally leaves little time for considered identification, and demon-killing is generally regarded as an exercise best left to highly trained professionals who can recognise instantly which species and grade they are confronting, and select their combat strategy accordingly. The only “one-size-fits-all” approach recognised by most competent authorities is physical cutting with either a living sword (of which only seven are known to exist) or a pantacopt, in the unlikely event that such an article is available at the time—

  Chris frowned, and touched pantacopt with his finger. The page cleared, the revolting little hourglass twirled, and then a small box appeared asking him for his user name and password. But that was all right; he knew the universal key.

  He cleared his throat. “Seven nine seven one A-square standard,” he said. The box vanished, and was replaced by—

  Sorry, your attempt to access restricted information was unsuccessful. This may be because—you mumbled—you have a cold—you have a strong regional accent or other speech impediment—you have recently undergone dental treatment and your mouth is still anaesthetised. Please rectify the problem and try again

  Chris said something vulgar and indicative of a limited vocabulary. It was an open secret that several of the other reps had spent their own money on the Kawaguchiya NZ3000 Open Book, which didn’t have all this interactive shit but did have an index. He cleared his throat again, sat up straight and did his best Alec Guinness impersonation, and this time got—

  The pantacopt is a magical weapon of exceptional power, capable of cutting through practically anything; furthermore, anything severed by one cannot be repaired, rejoined or revived, even by the most extreme magic Resembling a long thin sheet of metal foil, it operates by disrupting the severed object in all known dimensions and timeframes (making it impossible for the severed object to be taken back through time) while simultaneously cauterising the cut edges with transfiguration spells that transform them into mutually repellent elements, such as fire and water). Possession of pantacopts is illegal in most jurisdictions; in consequence, they are often magically disguised as everyday mundane objects, such as—

  He closed the book with a snap. Oh, he thought.

  Back at the office Chris had a desk. On his first day in the job he’d gone through the drawers, the way you do, and
one of the bits of stray useless junk he’d found in there was a tape-measure; something he hadn’t got but would soon be needing, since Karen wanted new carpet in the bathroom. So he’d slipped it in his pocket and promptly forgotten all about it, until the next day, when Julie from reception came crashing in asking if he’d seen a tape-measure anywhere. Rather than confess that he’d stolen it, which would have been embarrassing, he’d said no, but Julie had insisted on turning the whole room upside down looking for it, and when the search proved futile she gave him ever such a funny look and went off in a foul mood. Later, when carpet day arrived, Karen had already gone out and bought a tape-measure, and the stolen one had ended up in the kitchen drawer where hammers, screwdrivers and other DIY-related hardware went to hide; and he had no reason to believe it wasn’t still there.

  Unlikely, of course. Probably it was just the office tape-measure, and Julie had been all pissy about not finding it because Julie was all pissy about everything. Even so.

  “Was it all right?” the girl asked him as he emerged from the staffroom.

  Chris shook his head. “I’ll give you a returns note” he said, stowing the book in his jacket pocket. “Mind you send it in with the next invoice. Any other problems, while I’m here?”

  He drove straight home and hurried into the kitchen. It was there, buried under a dense seam of Rawlplugs, little metal things and bits of wooden dowel left over from various flat-pack assembly sessions. He picked it up nervously (exceptional power, capable of cutting through practically anything) and put it down gently on the worktop. Just a tape-measure, yellow, with the name of a big DIY chain printed on it; except, he noticed for the first time, the name was spelt wrong—

  Chris knew about that: the fundamental law of physical metamorphosis, by which any object magically transformed into something else will always have one slight flaw or mistake in it—a piano with one too many keys, a nine-legged spider, or anything produced by Microsoft. So, whatever the hell it was, it hadn’t been a tape-measure originally. Which proved nothing; could just as easily be that someone in the office, needing to measure something and being too idle to go round the building looking for the tape-measure, had magicked a box file or a stapler. That was far more likely—

  He stared at it. A magical weapon of exceptional power; sounded really cool on the page, but maybe not so cool if you had one lying on the table in front of you, lethal, illegal and almost certainly very dangerous to use. On the other hand, if he really was being followed about by demons, it’d be reassuring to think that he had some sort of an edge—

  Ouch; no pun intended. He looked around for something expendable, and assembled a carrot, a pencil and (for the hell of it) a heavy glass floral paperweight that Karen had been given as a leaving present by her enemies at her previous job, and which had so far resisted all efforts to smash or chip it. The carrot and the pencil he set up trestle-fashion, their ends perched on the rims of coffee mugs. Couldn’t do that with the paperweight, so he rested it on the tiled floor.

  “Here goes,” Chris said aloud, nestled his thumb against the small chrome tab that stuck out of the body of the tape-measure, and pulled.

  It looked just like a tape-measure: yellow steel strip, with numbers printed on it. This is silly, he thought; I bet it’s exactly what it looks like, a thing for measuring things with. In which case, argued his malicious inner voice, you can whack the carrot with it and nothing will happen, and then you can get a grip on yourself, forget all this dark magic stuff, and—

  He didn’t think he’d actually touched the carrot with the edge of the steel tape, just brought it very close; but the carrot halved, and the two pieces fell on to the worktop with a gentle thud. He froze, too scared to move; oh shit, he thought, it’s real, it works, now what the hell do I do? For one thing, how do you get the tape back inside the plastic case without strimming off all your fingers?

  Chris tried the pencil, which subdivided instantly. He was holding the tape-measure at arm’s length now, his head craned back and away, and he thought, what kind of dangerously irresponsible lunatic would disguise something like this as a tape-measure and then leave it lying about in a desk? And then he remembered the way the demon had grinned at him, and the feel of its arm brushing against him as it leaned forward; he relaxed just enough to move, and addressed the paperweight, squaring up to it the way he’d seen samurai do in films. Then, very carefully, he nudged the glass with the edge—

  Fuck, he thought; and then, Karen’s going to kill me when she sees this. The tape-measure hadn’t just gone through the paperweight (the halves of which had rolled away across the floor) but the tile as well, which had cracked in two. Thanks to the handy numbers printed on the side, he knew precisely how deep it had gone: nine inches, and he’d barely touched it.

  He drew it slowly out of the crack in the tile. There was the usual button on the side of the casing—press it forward and the tape would snap back into the handle. He didn’t fancy trying that, for some reason, but (maybe it was because he was nervous, which made him grip too hard and press the button accidentally) it did it anyway. There was a cracking noise, he felt the recoil as the chrome stop slammed against the plastic case, and—well, there it was, lying in the palm of his hand, a simple, inoffensive tape-measure. He could almost have convinced himself that none of it had happened—if it hadn’t been for the carrot, the pencil, the paperweight and the bloody great big crack in the kitchen tile, which Karen would notice the moment she set foot through the front door, and she was going to be so mad at him—

  Glue, Chris thought desperately; or Polyfilla and some of her make-up stuff, to make it the same colour as the tile. It was a good idea, by his standards, and it should have worked, except that nothing he tried would make the Polyfilla stay in the crack. He even tried looking up mending enchanted cracks in the Book, but all he got was an error message and please try again later; and when he tried again, what he got was—

  .’.. Operates by disrupting the severed object in all known dimensions and timeframes while simultaneously cauterising the cut edges with transfiguration spells that transform them into mutually repellent elements.

  Told you so.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Needless to say, Chris didn’t tell Karen about the pantacopt, or the demons. He said he’d accidentally knocked the paperweight onto the floor, and it had busted the tile and broken in two. She sulked about it all evening, then swept off to bed like a diplomat walking out of peace negotiations. It disturbed him to discover how little he cared.

  He was pretty tired too, but he didn’t want to go into the bedroom while there was any chance that she’d still be awake, so he settled down in the armchair with The Book of All Human Knowledge. For some reason, the stupid thing kept wanting him to read about Gandhi, but he really wasn’t in the mood, so he used his master key and looked up satellite navigation systems, magical—

  ... Operated by a captive spirit, typically a nymph, sprite or genius loci, although entities as diverse as angels and demons have been successfully used; generally, however, the spirit is a convicted criminal, condemned to life imprisonment in its native jurisdiction, which means that navigation spirits are usually only sourced from communities with whom the equipment manufacturers have made suitable arrangements. The spirit is kept restrained inside the apparatus by a variety

  of containment charms; equipment offered for sale inside the EU must carry enchantments rated to Level 9 or above under the terms of EU Directive 5567442/9IB. Although considered safe for everyday use, these devices carry an undeniable element of risk. There have been authenticated cases of malign influence and possession, especially where the equipment is in daily use, and the user is particularly vulnerable, weak-willed, impressionable, of below average intelligence or starved of affection—

  (Yup, Chris thought, that’s me; five out of five.)

  In cases where possession has become complete, very little can be done to save the victim, who is usually confined in secure quarantined
accommodation so as to prevent him from becoming a danger to himself and others. If the victim realises his predicament early enough, however, the possession process can easily be interrupted—simple distractions such as the playing of music or radio broadcasts are often sufficient—and in most cases the victim will make a full recovery without unduly distressing withdrawal symptoms. Danger signs to watch out for include engaging the apparatus in conversation—

  Oh, he thought. More or less what Ben had told him, and if it was in the Book it had to be true. Although there wasn’t much there that he hadn’t already known, reading it had left him feeling shaken and upset; he closed the Book and switched on the telly, but he had to keep the volume so low, in order not to wake Karen, that he couldn’t follow the plot, and soon gave up. He’d decided it was safe to go to bed when the phone rang.

  “Sorry to call so late.” Jill’s voice. “I’m not disturbing you, am I?”

  “Just a second.” He’d bought an extra-long flex for the phone so that he could take it into the kitchen if anybody rang after curfew. “That’s better. OK, fire away.”

  “I was thinking,” she said. “About your demon. Are you absolutely positive you haven’t left something out? Only I just can’t account for why it didn’t attack.”

  Chris almost told her; about how the demon had reached past him and touched the SatNav button. Things were different now, he could see that. Before, the captive spirit’s enchantment had made him want to protect it; now he knew the awful truth, so why shouldn’t he tell Jill? Sure, she’d probably lecture him about being vulnerable, weak-willed, impressionable, of below average intelligence and starved of affection, but he could handle that—he’d never had a high enough opinion of himself to be upset by the truth. Telling her would be the sensible thing to do. But he didn’t.