May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  “Not yet,” Chris replied. “They asked me loads of questions and took my car for forensic tests. They think it might have been hiding in something I was carrying; a sanctuary,” he added, remembering the technical term Jill had used. “Something like a BB—”

  “You know a lot about it,” Angela said.

  It was practically an accusation. “Picked up quite a bit from them while they were interviewing me,” he said. “Listen, give me ten minutes to get dressed, and then I suppose we’d better be getting along, if it’s so urgent.”

  When he got back, he found Karen in the living room with her. Angela was looking at something terribly interesting on the carpet, while Karen was mauling a cushion with her fingers. She looked up as he came into the room and said, “How long are you going to be? Only we’re supposed to be at Molly and Clive’s by one, and you were going to make a start on the bathroom.”

  On the other hand, Chris thought, getting dragged out by the government on a Saturday morning had its bright side. And it was his civic duty, of course. “I don’t know,” he said. “Could just be a couple of hours, could be all day. I’ll phone when—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Karen snapped. “I’ll just have to tell Molly you’re ill. Again,” she added. “But you’ve got to get that bathroom started—I’ve got the carpet on order.”

  (And he couldn’t help dunking: when did it all change? Because at school, and just afterwards, it was Karen who chased after me; she laughed at my jokes and smiled a lot, and once she came to a football match with me. I still love her, of course, but something changed. At which point, in some remote siding on a rural branch-line of his mind, a train of thought gradually shuffled into movement.)

  “Was that your wife?” Angela asked when they were outside, walking to where he’d left the car.

  “Yes,” Chris answered, because he couldn’t face explaining. “You mustn’t mind her, she’s been under a lot of pressure at work lately, makes her a bit—”

  “Is she in the business too?”

  He nodded. “She’s in the mineral rights department at Donder and Busch. Scrying for natural gas deposits under the North Sea, mostly. Of course, they do it all from aerial photographs.”

  “It’s a big firm, isn’t it?”

  “Quite big, yes. She’s assistant head of section,” he added, trying to make it sound like he was boasting. She didn’t seem interested.

  “We did scrying at uni,” Angela said. “I was rubbish at it. It must be boring, doing that all day.”

  “I don’t think she does much actual scrying these days. More sort of managerial.” Shouts at people, in other words. “Hence the pressure.”

  “Ah.”

  There was the black BMW, property of Her Majesty’s government It’d have been so nice if he could’ve hung on to it just a little bit longer, but Jill’s people would be coming to collect it that evening. Or, come to think of it, they’d probably take it off him when he got to their offices, and give him the bus fare home. Life can be so—

  “What’s DS stand for?”

  Chris’s mind went blank; then he realised he must have put yesterday’s shirt on, the polo shirt he’d got from Jill’s bloke. “I don’t know,” he said. “Designer Shirt, probably. Or somebody’s name.” He was about to say it wasn’t his shirt, but he didn’t. Maybe he thought it wasn’t worth mentioning.

  “And that’s not your car, is it?”

  “No. It’s one they lent me while—”

  He stopped. There was something wrong with the car. He lunged closer, and saw that the window had been forced open and the interior was a mess. The seats (the beautiful plush German luxury seats, a tantalising hint of a world of opulence and ease that he knew he could never attain) had been ripped up, the plastic dashboard panels were cracked and distorted where somebody had tried to prise them off, and the glove compartment door was hanging loose by one mangled hinge.

  “Fuck,” Chris said.

  She frowned. “It’s a bit scruffy,” she said. “Was it like that when you got it?”

  He stuck his head through the open window and looked more closely. Further desecrations: the footwell mats had been ripped out and shredded, the padded headrests had been slit open, the ashtrays had been torn out, and the attackers had put a lot of effort and ingenuity into trying to get the radio, though somehow or other it had held out and beaten the siege, like Malta, though paying a dreadful price for its resistance. It was enough to break your heart.

  “Oh,” Angela was saying. “Someone’s tried to break into it.”

  Chris wasn’t interested in anything she might have to say. The ghastly thought had just struck him that, since it had been in his possession at the time, he might be liable for the repairs.

  “Bastards,” he mumbled. “Bastard bloody kids, just look at what they’ve—”

  “I don’t think it was kids,” Angela said quietly. “Look.”

  She was pointing at the murdered seats, and she had a point. It wasn’t just random slashes; there were five long, straight, parallel lacerations in the shape of a capital I. Someone with an excessively vivid imagination might well attribute them to a powerful long-fingered hand, tipped with very sharp claws.

  “I think they were looking for something,” she said.

  Oh, Chris thought. “You reckon?” he said, and noted that his voice was higher and squeakier than usual. “I suppose so, yes. Wasting their time, of course, that’s the stupid thing. Apart from the radio, there wasn’t anything in there worth nicking.”

  “How do you know?” Angela said thoughtfully. “You said it’s not your car. For all you know, there might’ve been something hidden in it.”

  Suddenly, having to pay for the damage no longer seemed the worst thing Chris could imagine. The claw marks; and the strength it must’ve taken to crack the dash like that, even if they’d been using a jemmy, and he had an idea they hadn’t.

  “I suppose I’d better call the demon-control people,” he said wearily. “If it was a—well, one of them that did this, they’ll want to do all their forensic stuff on it. We’d better not touch anything. Last thing I need is another bollocking.”

  “But we’re supposed to go straight to their office,” Angela objected. “Mr Burnoz said it’s really urgent.”

  She was starting to get on Chris’s nerves. “Fine,” he said. “And exactly how do you suggest we get there? We can’t drive this wreck. Even if it’s still running after what’s been done to it, we’ll smudge all the pawprints and stuff.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “We’ll go in my car. It’s parked just round the corner.”

  It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder how she’d got there; as far as he was concerned, she was just a pest who sprouted up out of the ground to torment him. “Your car,” he repeated.

  “Yes. Look, why don’t you phone the demon people to come and see to this car, and then we’ll drive over to their place in mine.”

  There was a flaw in her reasoning, but Chris was too shocked and preoccupied to bother isolating it. “Yes, all right,” he said distractedly. “We’ll do that, then. Where did you say your—?”

  He’d been expecting something ancient and beat-up and studenty; but her car turned out to be an almost new shiny red Suzuki jeep, the interior clean, tidy and smelling discreetly of air freshener. Her mother’s, he rationalised, borrowed for the morning.

  “Do you know how to get there?” Chris asked as he put on his seat belt. “I don’t.”

  Angela flipped open the glove compartment and pulled out a map, printed off a computer. “I got it off Google,” she said. “I’ve marked the route in yellow felt tip.”

  Well, he thought. Clearly they do teach them something at university, besides how to carry their liquor and stuff newspaper into the pockets of pool tables so as to play for free. “I’ll map-read,” he offered.

  She started the engine. “All right.”

  “Right.” He studied the map, turned it the right way up, and found
where they were. “OK, carry on to the end of this road and turn right.”

  Naturally that made him think about SatNav, which in turn reminded him of what Jill had told him. Hang on, he thought; what if it wasn’t a demon that trashed the Beemer? After all, demons don’t have a monopoly on claws and sharp pointed teeth. The SatNav entity had broken out of the government labs, and Jill had as good as told him it might come looking for him. So, what if it had been SatNav—disturbed, psychotic and lovesick—who’d junked the car, searching for clues that’d lead her to him? Chris thought about that. It was a motive; maybe not a very good one, but surely rather more plausible than a mystery demon he’d never met getting fixated on him.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Which way now?”

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, and checked. “Yes, fine, got it. At the roundabout, take the third—no, forget that—take the fourth exit.”

  “There isn’t any roundabout,” Angela pointed out. “Just a junction. Do I go left here or right?”

  “Course there’s a— No, sorry, hang on,” Chris added, peering at the map. “That’s the flyover, not the railway bridge. OK, turn left here, then carry straight on till you get to the—” Truth was, he’d never been much good at maps. In fact, if map-reading was an event at the 2012 Olympics, the only way he’d make the national team would be if there was a mass outbreak of the Black Death around Christmas 2011. It was a skill he hadn’t needed lately, of course, because he’d had his own personal navigator, perched on the dashboard, always ready with the answers. He was going to miss her, he realised. Then he pictured the BMW’s shredded seats, and those long, steady sweeping cuts.

  “I don’t think this is the right way,” Angela said.

  “No, we’re bang on course, there’s the railway line, look, so—”

  “That’s the canal, not the railway line.”

  So it was. “All right,” Chris said, trying to make it seem like he was indulging her in some trivial whim. “Take the next right, then immediately left—”

  “I’d rather not,” she said. “This is a car, not a narrow boat.”

  She had a point there. “Sorry, make that left, then immediately right, which ought to bring us out onto the B6603—” Ten minutes later, Chris gave up. “Just pull over as soon as you can,” he said wearily, “and you have a look at the stupid thing. I can’t make any sense of it. I mean, it just doesn’t seem to bear any relation to what’s actually there on the ground, if you follow me.”

  She looked at him. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s a map.”

  Which was entirely true. But, according to the map, the canal was over there, not right in front of them, because there were the gasworks, there was the railway, you didn’t have to be bloody Lewis and Clark to figure it out; in which case, the map was deliberately lying to him—

  Chris pulled himself together with a snap. It was, of course, possible that the Ordnance Survey was part of a vast murky conspiracy to drive him out of his mind, but he was inclined to doubt it, all things considered.

  “We’re going to be so late,” Angela said mournfully. “We were supposed to go over there right away, Mr Burnoz said.”

  Hardly what he needed to hear, lost in the urban jungle. “Fine,” he said. “Soon as you can pull over, we’ll look at the map and find out where we are.”

  Pulling over, however, wasn’t that easy; not on a dual carriageway with lorries surging around them like a school of giant dolphins; and every minute was taking them further in the wrong direction. Then he saw a signpost: they were only half a mile from the Ettingate Retail Park, one of those out-of-town shopping developments; two dozen megastores and, it went without saying, ample parking facilities. “Next left,” he ordered gratefully.

  The main cark park was huge, about twice the size of medieval London. It was also full. They’d driven round it twice before Chris noticed a single solitary space, far out on the eastern spiral arm. “There,” he said urgently, pointing. “Quick, before some other bugger—”

  Angela might have been female, but she could park; secretly and grudgingly, Chris was impressed. Maybe it’d be too much to expect her to be able to read maps as well, but he doubted she could make a worse job of it than he’d just done. She backed in—dead level, equidistant from the white lines on either side, a small miracle of offhand precision—put on the handbrake and killed the engine.

  “Now,” Chris said, pointing at the map, “if we’re here, then that must be the main A6674—” Suddenly everything went dark, like an eclipse. He looked up, but Angela wasn’t in the driver’s seat any more. It was light inside the car, but it was as though someone had pasted black crepe paper on all the windows. He swore and tried to open his door; the lock operated, but the door was jammed and wouldn’t move, as though he’d parked too close to the garage wall. It was also getting very, very cold. Not right, he told himself, this is something bad, quite probably not in Kansas any more, and he hadn’t got the faintest idea what he should do about it.

  The car began to rock gently from side to side. Chris tried the door handle again, and yelped with pain as his fingers touched it: burning hot, presumably a hint. He whimpered, but a small part of his mind was telling him, where there’s a hint, there’s a hinter. If someone’s trying to tell you something, then this is deliberate, not just some random natural disaster. Fair point, but he wasn’t reassured. Quite the reverse, in fact.

  “Hello?” he said, in a funny little quavery voice. “Who’s there? Excuse me.”

  The car stopped rocking, which was good, because the movement was doing things to his bladder. But that wasn’t all. Everything around him, the car door, the dashboard, the roof, was gradually beginning to fade; the colour was leaching out of them, making them look like pencil outlines that hadn’t been coloured in yet. He stared at the gear lever and realised he could see through it. Also, there was a distinctive smell that he was fairly sure he recognised. Not good at all.

  Chris held up his hand and looked at it; at rather than through, which was something. At this rate, though, pretty soon the car was going to evaporate completely. He wriggled, realised he was still wearing his seat belt, tried to press the release button and squealed with terror as his thumb passed straight through it without touching anything; the belt, however, still held him firmly in the seat, which continued to bear his weight even though it was now little more than a water-colour smudge. He jerked his head round to stare at the back window, but there was nothing to see, just black.

  The car went on fading, and Chris imagined what it’d be like once it had gone completely, leaving him sitting in a box full of nothing, with empty black walls. Somehow he didn’t fancy that at all. He’d always been a bit nervous about confined spaces, even at the best of times, of which this wasn’t one. The hell with this, he told himself, got to get out of here. Even the darkness outside the absence-of-windows had to be better than this. But the seat belt, though now to all intents and purposes invisible, wouldn’t let him go—he could feel it even though he couldn’t see it, and he really wished he had a knife or a pair of scissors—

  Hang on, Chris thought, I can do better than that. The tape-measure, the pantacopt: it could cut through anything, so the Book had said. Seat-belt webbing, invisible car doors, maybe it could even slice a way through the solid black darkness outside. Worth a try, at any rate. He dug his fingers into his pocket, but it was empty, and with a pang of deep sorrow he remembered: earlier that morning, he’d fished the tape-measure out of his jacket pocket, just after Jill had rung and he’d been getting himself into a state about being stalked by the SatNav monster. What he couldn’t remember was putting it back again. In which case, it was still at home, in his dressing-gown pocket, maybe, or sitting on the table in the kitchen. Marvellous, he thought. Just the fucking job.

  The light inside the car, or the space where the car had been, was beginning to fade, and suddenly Chris thought hang on, I know what’s happening, I must be dead
; no, listen, it all fits, that’s why Angela suddenly vanished, and why I can’t move, also the sudden cold and everything fading away. So stupid of me not to have realised before: I died. Heart attack, or a stroke, or maybe there was a demon hiding in the back somewhere, and when we stopped the car it jumped me and pulled my head off. He caught himself adding, so that’s all right, then; because it would be all right, wouldn’t it? There was nothing bad or scary about death when you stopped and thought about it; it’s perfectly natural, happens to us all, and once you’re dead it’s over, and nothing bad can ever happen to you again. Compared to the other alternative explanations—the weirdness, the implications of the world outside turning black and the car just melting away—it was positively reassuring—

  “No, you’re not,” said a voice.

  Chris jumped in his seat, as far as the invisible seat belt would let him.

  “You’re not dead,” the voice said. “You should be so lucky.”

  It wasn’t a nice voice; it was high and thin and scratchy, not a human voice, though he noted that it spoke flawless received-pronunciation English, accentless, like a Radio 4 announcer. It wasn’t a voice that came out on the air expelled from lungs past vocal cords, regulated by the movement of lips; it was a synthesised voice, a talking thing, and he was hearing it with his mind rather than his ears.

  “Keep perfectly still,” the voice said. “We’ll get to you as soon as it stabilises.”

  As soon as what does what? The feeling of calm, even euphoria, that had spread over Chris when he’d thought he’d died had dissipated like damp off a windscreen when you turn on the blower. Instead he felt bitterly cold and totally vulnerable, as though all his skin had fallen off and he was just one great big open wound. Also, it’d be very nice if he could get to a toilet very soon.

  “Won’t take long,” the voice said, and if it was trying to sound soothing it was making a real hash of it. “Then you’re coming with us.”

  “I’d rather not,” Chris said aloud, which made the voice laugh so much that his head shook.