by Tom Holt
“Not up to you,” the voice said. “Right, that’s about it.”
There was nothing left of the car, or the seat he’d been sitting on. He was sitting on nothing at all; he couldn’t feel it, even, but he was sitting rather than lying, because his back was bent and his knees were at right angles to his spine. He couldn’t feel the seat belt either, but something, some force was operating on his chest, keeping him from moving.
“Now I’ll give you three guesses,” the voice said, “and you’ve got to tell me what I am. Ready?”
Chris tried to open his mouth, but it wouldn’t.
“Something beginning,” said the voice, “with D.”
Death? he thought hopefully. . “No. Second guess?”
Something that pins you to a chair and tortures you. Dentist?
“Warmer, but no.”
Oh, he thought.
“Yes.”
So, Chris thought, this is it, then. This time I’m really in the shit.
“No. Being in shit really isn’t that bad. It’s squishy and smelly, but you survive. Your living soul isn’t ripped out of your body and shredded into mush. We recommend that you select a more pertinent metaphor.”
At the end of all things, after fear and panic and false hope and despair, comes irritation, and an unwillingness to be mucked around with by someone who thinks he’s really smart. What do you want? Chris thought. Get it over with and then please go away. I really don’t like you very much.
“All right,” said the voice. “Just tell me where she is, and then I’ll kill you. Can’t say fairer than that.”
“Where she is? I don’t understand.”
Inside his mind, a tongue clicked impatiently; probably scaly and forked, but to him it wasn’t scary, just annoying. I don’t know who you mean, he thought.
“Loyalty,” said the voice. “Courage. Heroism, even. It says in here that you don’t believe in heroism.”
In here?
“In your mind.”
Well, it’s perfectly true, I don’t.
“Well, then. Tell us where she is, and then it’ll all be over.”
And then Chris thought, hold on; if you can read my mind, why are you asking me questions?
He was briefly aware of a feeling of discomfort; not his own. “There’s bits we can’t reach,” the voice said, “not unless you open them for us. Which you’re strongly advised to do, by the way, because the bits of your mind we can reach include—well, let’s see, this bit here. Wonder what happens if I do that?”
It was a kind of pain Chris had never felt before, bearing the same relation to the worst pain he’d ever felt that concentrated orange juice straight from the bottle bears to the diluted stuff you actually drink. It wasn’t localised anywhere, like toothache or a crushed toe; it was everywhere, in everything.
“So that’s what it does,” said the voice. “Fancy that.”
The curious thing about it, though, was that although it was agonising and excruciating and turned his brain to mush, it didn’t really hurt because—
“And if you think that was bad,” he heard the voice say.
—Because he didn’t believe in it; because it wasn’t real, precisely because it wasn’t in any one place, it didn’t relate to anything; it was virtual pain, and he was feeling it not because he was suffering genuine physical damage but because some evil little grey bugger was prodding a nerve centre in his brain with a pointy fingernail.
You really don’t need to do that, Chris thought irritably. If I knew who you were on about, I’d tell you.
“You know perfectly well,” said the voice.
No, I don’t, he snapped back, and you’re too busy being cruel and merciless and all that rubbish to tell me, which is just stupid. The trouble with you is, you enjoy your work too much.
More pain, much more intense, but Chris ignored it and thought, you can do that till the cows come home but it’s not going to get you anywhere. But if you’ll just tell me—
No reply, just more pain; and he thought, oh for crying out loud. It was, he reflected, a bit like those long, dreary rows with Karen, where she wouldn’t tell him what the matter was, he was supposed to figure it out, or guess, or use telepathy; and it was bad enough when she did it, but he was prepared to put up with it from her because she was his girlfriend, and apparently that was part of the deal. But the owner of the voice had no such claim on him, so he was rapidly running out of patience—
The pain stopped, but not because the owner of the voice wanted it to. “Oh,” it said; and then, “How are you doing that?”
I can’t be bothered with it, Chris thought back. Now, will you answer the question?
“You know perfectly well—”
No, I don’t, he thought; and then he realised, you can’t say the name, right? It’s some stupid rule. You can’t say the name unless I say it first.
“Something like that,” the voice replied grumpily. “But you do know, you’re just being difficult.”
Chris was feeling very tired and fed up now. All right, he decided, let’s think. So he thought; and somehow he knew he’d gone into the part of his mind where the demon couldn’t get in, and it was so nice to get away from it for a moment, not because of the pain or the fear but because the demon was so obnoxiously boring and stupid. Now then, he thought, what was the question? Ah yes. Where is she?
He scanned the list of possibilities: females of his acquaintance who’d disappeared. It wasn’t a long list; just one, in fact. Angela the trainee, who’d been sitting next to him and had then just vanished...
Hello, he thought, I’m back.
“Well?”
I think I know who you’re on about, Chris thought, but I’m afraid the answer’s still the same. I don’t know.
“Yes, you do,” the voice screamed at him; rather childishly, in his opinion. “She was with you, in the car—her smell was all over the seat.”
Yes, that’s right, he thought wearily, she was with me but now she’s gone, you can see that for yourself. She just vanished, and I haven’t got a clue where she’s gone to. Surely you can tell if I’m lying to you or not. Well?
A long pause. Then the voice said, “Shit”
So you agree. I’m telling the truth.
“Looks like it,” the voice conceded unhappily.
Right, then, Chris thought briskly, in that case, you’d better get on and kill me, hadn’t you? Come to that, you might even let me go.
Silence; then, just as he was starting to wonder, the voice laughed and said, “Nice try.” At which point, all that calm, stoical acceptance that had purged him of the fear of death sizzled away like milk on a hot stove, and terror came flooding back, and Chris discovered that, after all, he really, really didn’t want to die, especially not if there was even the remotest chance that it’d hurt. He launched himself at the invisible seat belt, which bounced him sharply back against the invisible seat, so he tried to wriggle sideways, and found he couldn’t do that either; and he couldn’t hear the voice any more, and that was all the confirmation he needed, because anybody could see that demons aren’t the sort of creatures who talk to their food—
But there was another voice, one that Chris recognised. “Get away from him,” she shouted, and he heard the demon hiss; not with his mind but with his ears. Then a noise just like a butcher cleaving through a thick joint of beef, and a scream, not human, and the ting of one metal object glancing off another. Then another scream, as much rage as pain, and the sound of a woman grunting with effort; and then the light came on.
It was like when Karen suddenly switched on the bedside lamp, when she’d woken up in the middle of the night and needed to read for a bit before she could get back to sleep. The sudden glare was like a slap on the face, and Chris instinctively turned his head away from it. When he looked back, he saw her; the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen. Not just film-star or supermodel beautiful; they are, after all, only human. The point being, she obviously wasn’t. In fact (
he rationalised later) she didn’t actually look all that much like a human female; or rather, she looked like the original, of which human beings are cheap knock-off copies you buy on market stalls. Human skin doesn’t glow, and neither does human hair shimmer; it’s too thick and stiff and hard, though you don’t notice it until you get a chance to take a good close look at the real thing.
She was dressed in some sort of silvery thing that was either scales or feathers or, somehow or other, both. She was leaning forward with both hands on the grip of a sword (except it wasn’t; where the blade should have been there was just a long thin black line, so thin it barely made three dimensions) and the light he was staring at her by came, he realised, from her skin and hair and that funny silvery dress; it defined the shape where the car had been, but there was nothing contained in that space besides the two of them and a moderate helping of air.
“It’s you,” Chris heard himself say. “I recognised your voice.”
She turned her head to face him, and her eyes were as bright as a welder’s arc, burning half-moons across his retina as her head moved. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“Yes, it is, it’s you,” he insisted. “You’re her. You’re SatNav.”
The eyes flared; he raised his hand to shield himself from them, but it did no good. He could still see them through his own palm.
“Oh shut up,” she said, and she swung the sword up and brought it swishing down, straight at him. Chris opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out, and he felt the unseen seat belt give way. Without it to restrain him he rolled forward out of the invisible seat, and as he fell towards the solid black ground the light faded; not to pitch black but to a gloomy sort of twilight, because that was how dim and feeble ordinary daylight was in comparison.
He sat up. He was sitting on the tarmac of a parking space in the Ettingate Retail Park car park, in between an old red Volvo and a silver Peugeot, and there was a thin smear of blood seeping through his shirt front from a shallow graze, roughly where a seat belt would normally have crossed his chest.
CHAPTER FIVE
“And you’re sure it was her,” Jill said, for the fifth time.
“You’re sure.”
“Absolutely,” Chris replied, stifling a yawn. “I’d know her voice anywhere. It’s been telling me where to go for the last five months.”
Jill’s office wasn’t a bit like he’d imagined. He’d had this mental picture of something out of an American cop show, the 14th Precinct or whatever: open-plan bustle, men in shirtsleeves, phones ringing, a Brownian commotion of activity. But no. It was small—the building used to be an ordinary mid-Victorian house, Jill had told him, and her bit of it had been a boiler room—and cluttered, with filing cabinets jostling round her desk like gawpers at an accident scene. There were piles of green, blue and beige folders all over her desk, the windowsill and the floor. She had a computer and a phone, a stapler and a Darth Vader coffee mug, and in one corner there was an umbrella stand, crammed with weapons. He’d been trying not to stare at them ever since she’d brought him in.
“Sorry,” Jill said, “but I’d like to go through the sequence of events just one more time. I’m sure I must be missing something.”
(There was an axe, for example, and a sledgehammer, two short spears and a variety of different swords—straight and curved, long, short, thick and thin—and a big slashy sort of thing with very peculiar lettering on the blade, and something that looked like a saw on a stick—)
“We got lost,” Chris said wearily. “I got us lost, I’m not much good at maps—”
“That’s strange,” she interrupted. “In your line of work, I mean. I’d have thought you must’ve got quite good at reading maps. You haven’t always had a—”
Delicacy of feeling, he assumed, made her tail off before actually saying the S-word. “I managed,” he replied. “And after a bit, you keep going to the same places, you know the way, you don’t need a map.”
Jill’s eyebrow raised a little. “That’s another thing,” she said. “You’ve got your set rounds, right? And, like you say, you know how to get to them, you could probably find your way around your routes with your eyes shut. So why did you need to use the—?”
He broke eye contact and didn’t reply.
“It’s all right,” she said nicely. “You aren’t the first person it’s happened to, you know. And it’s important that we understand exactly how close the—well, the link between you and it was. You see, the closer the link, the worse the obsession is, if they get loose. If you only used it, say, once a month, it’d be hard for it to find you. But if you used it every day—”
She looked at Chris as she said it. He nodded.
“If you used it every day,” Jill repeated, “it sort of gets tuned in to you, and it can home in on you really easily. Which I guess explains how she found you.”
Chris grinned sadly. “My own stupid fault, in other words.”
“You can see it like that if you want to,” she replied. “I don’t. Personally I think they can be very dangerous things, and there ought to be strict controls on how they’re sold. But,” she added, with a shrug, “the people who matter don’t agree with me, or at least not yet, so there we go. Anyway, I’m sorry, I interrupted. Go on with what you were saying.”
So he went through it yet again, while Jill made them both a coffee with the kettle perched on a crag of folders: the car park, Angela’s sudden disappearance, the demon, the threats, the pain, where is she, all that—
“And it was just about to kill me,” Chris said, “when she turned up.”
(There was a photo of Jill’s mum and dad on the desk, buried among the paperwork like miners trapped in a cave-in. He barely recognised them, because of the dust on the glass.)
“It does seem like a bit of a coincidence,” Jill said, not for the very first time.
He shrugged. “Yes,” he said, “it does, rather. Anyway, I couldn’t see what was going on, but I’m pretty sure she fought the demon, because it screamed a lot, didn’t sound like it was having a very nice time, and when the lights came on it wasn’t there any more, and she was looking a bit puffed, leaning on the sword thing she had with her. A bit,” he couldn’t help adding, “like that one you’ve got there. Look—wedged in between the meat cleaver and the polo mallet.”
Jill smiled indulgently. “You mean the estoc,” she said. “And the meat cleaver’s a bardische, and that’s not a polo mallet, it’s a martel. You use it for hammering stakes into the hearts of vampires.”
“Oh.”
“Quite,” she said. “Serves you right for asking. Actually,” she added, “now you mention it, that’s quite interesting, if what it had really was an estoc.”
“What’s an—?”
“Very specialised,” she replied. “Quite rare, too. The blade is a single hair from the head of a fallen angel.”
“Oh.”
“Really, it is,” Jill said, with a grin. “No kidding. It’s given like a really, really heavy relaxing treatment, to keep it straight, and it’ll cut through pretty much anything.”
“Like a pantacopt,” Chris said, without thinking.
She gave him ever such a funny look. “A bit like a pantacopt,” she replied. “Only not as good, obviously.” She paused. “You’re pretty well informed, aren’t you?”
“Ah well,” Chris replied, trying to sound flippant, and failing. “Magic artefacts are my business, so I know a lot of—”
“Not one of JWW Retail’s biggest-volume lines, though, are they? Or if they are, we really ought to know about it.”
“I read about them in some book, OK?” He could feel the conversation starting to seize up, like an unlubricated engine. “Stuck in my mind for some reason. They reminded me of light sabres, in Star Wars.“
“What in what?”
Chris frowned. “It’s a film,” he said.
“Oh.” Jill shrugged. “Anyway,” she said, “if the entity from your SatNav really has managed t
o get hold of an estoc, that’s not good at all. I’m starting to wonder if it stole it from here, before it broke out. We’ll have to do an inventory.”
“Glad you’re taking it seriously,” he said. “Bearing in mind it was me she tried to chop up with the bloody thing.”
“Quite.” Jill leaned back a little in her chair. She was starting to get a bit of a double chin, he noticed, and her face was a bit rounder than it used to be. “About that. You say it attacked you.”
Chris nodded. “Oh yes,” he said. “After she’d chased off the demon.” He paused, then said, “I guess it was my fault. You see, I recognised her voice, when she yelled something at the demon, and I told her so. I said ‘I know who you are’ or something like that. She said no, I must be wrong, but I insisted, and then she slashed at me with the sword thing. Luckily she missed me but cut the seat belt, and I fell forward and—well, there I was in the car park. But it was me insisting I knew who she was that made her go for me, I’m sure of it.”
Jill nodded. “You were very lucky,” she said. “All the way through, in fact. Actually, it’s amazing you’re still here.”
“That’s nice to know,” Chris growled; then, “Look, what exactly did happen to me? You’ve been asking all these questions, but you haven’t told me anything, and I think I’ve got a right—”
“Fair enough,” Jill said. “All right, this is what we think happened. Most of it’s just speculation, mind, we don’t actually know, but the theory is that you were lured there deliberately by the demons, because they think you know ‘something.’”
Chris scowled. “They should’ve talked to Miss Hickey, then,” he said. “She always reckoned I didn’t know anything.”
“I don’t think they’re interested in GCSE-level geography,” Jill replied. “We do know that it wasn’t your trainee that called at your flat. We checked; her mother said she was in her room all morning, working on a research project for her degree course, so she never left the house. What you saw was probably a demon under a glamour.”
“Oh.”
“No reason why you should’ve suspected anything,” Jill said. “It’s fairly basic technology, and just the sort of thing demons are good at. Also, we checked with your Mr Burnoz and it was the first he’d heard of any of it; so it’s definitely looking like a set-up, and they wanted you in that car park at that particular time.”
