by Tom Holt
Pathetic. Well, yes, he thought; that’s me. I’m stuck with me and I’d better get used to the idea. Whatever plan of action I commit to had better be something that can be carried through successfully by a pathetic person. Much too late in the day to start growing a backbone, what with all the other stuff I’ve got going on in my life right now.
Chris went to bed, turned off the light and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling, as wide awake as a coffee-tasters’ convention. So Angela, he told himself, is the one who is to come, the demon who’s got to be kept safe. And Jill must be running the underground railroad to get her away from the nasty demons. Fine. So where does SatNav come in? Warning me, I guess, for my own good, because nobody else saw fit to tell me what’s going on. Very civil of her, I’m sure, but can I actually believe a word of it? After all, it was Jill who told me that SatNav’s creepy and stalky and evil, but surely Jill and SatNav must be on the same side, if they both want to save Angela from the Fundies. And since the scheme hasn’t worked and the demons know that Angela’s with me, what the hell is the point of carrying on with it? Surely it’s become completely counterproductive, as well as everything else. Doesn’t make any sense—
He thought about getting up and phoning Jill again, but he decided against it. If Jill had lied to him, or at the very least neglected to keep him informed about some fairly relevant stuff affecting him personally, he was honour bound to kick up a fuss about it, and he didn’t have the energy. I’m missing something, he told himself; something very important and probably quite obvious. Won’t I feel a right prune when I finally figure out what it is.
Meanwhile: am I going in to work tomorrow, or not? Well: substantial chance I might get killed or abducted by demons. Balance that risk against all the strop I’m likely to get from Mr Burnoz if I don’t. No contest, really. And then he thought: maybe that’s how heroism works. Maybe the great heroes of legend only did the scary stuff because they were too scared or too embarrassed not to.
At some point Chris must’ve drifted off to sleep, because he found himself on a bare and windswept hillside, and he knew it must be a dream because all the bare and windswept hillsides in his dreams were actually the patch of post-industrial waste ground at the back of the school football pitch, only a bit larger and with mountains in the background. Anyhow: he was lying on his back on a big flat stone, with chains on his wrists and ankles holding him down; and there were three vultures sitting on the rock looking thoughtfully at him. One of them was Angela, one was Jill, and SatNav, bald-necked and oily-feathered, was the third. He yawned in his dream, because although he’d never been in this particular scenario before it was tiresomely similar to all the other anxiety dreams with women in them, and he was tempted to fast-forward or wake up. But then there was a fifth bird: a hummingbird, which the vultures didn’t seem to have noticed. It hovered close to his left ear (the vultures were sitting on his right) and whispered to him.
At first Chris couldn’t make out what it was saying, which was entirely fair and reasonable, since he wasn’t exactly fluent in Bird. He shook his head to shoo it away, but it moved a little closer, and he began to understand;
“Remember what she told you about the Fey,” it muttered. “Dreams, right? This is serious. This is actually happening. Do you understand?”
It seemed important to her, so he nodded. “Got you,” he whispered back. “Who the hell are you?”
“Right now? The only hope you’ve got. Now, do exactly what I tell you. On the count of three...”
“At Honest John’s,” he couldn’t help asking, “did SatNav send you?”
“Her? You’ve got to be joking. Now, on three, I want you to—”
“She didn’t? But she said—”
“Telling porky pies, wasn’t she? Now, when I say three, all you’ve got to do is—”
“So if you aren’t from SatNav,” he insisted, “who—?”
“Oh, forget it,” said the hummingbird furiously. “Wake yourself up.”
Which he did, though the alarm might have had something to do with it, not to mention Karen shaking him savagely by the arm and hissing, “Wake up, for crying out loud, you’ll be late for work.”
Chris grunted and opened his eyes, and for some reason he asked, “Why are we redecorating the bathroom? It was fine as it was.” But Karen only scowled at him and left the room.
Not a good start to the day; his shaver batteries were flat, there wasn’t any hot water, no bread in the bread bin, no coffee in the coffee jar. And he was definitely missing something, and he still hadn’t got the faintest idea what it could be.
“Your boss rang,” Karen said, poised on the threshold. “I said you were still asleep. Call him back. Number’s on the pad.”
Oh God, he thought (and noted wryly that a phone call from Mr Burnoz scared him every bit as much as demons). He dialled the number and got a woman’s voice. “Yes?” she snapped.
“Can I speak to Mr Burnoz, please? It’s Chris Popham, he’s expecting—”
Sigh. “All right, yes, I’ll get him, don’t go away.” Mr Burnoz’s wife, he assumed. For the very first time ever, Chris felt mildly sorry for him.
“Chris? Good of you to call back. Now listen—I’m afraid Angela’s had an accident.”
His head swam like an otter. “Excuse me?”
“An accident,” Mr Burnoz repeated impatiently. “She’s in hospital.”
“What happened?”
Slight pause. Then: “I don’t know. But I got a call from her mother. Obviously, she won’t be coming to work today.” Mr Burnoz’s voice suggested that as far as he was concerned there was no obviously about it; Mr Burnoz automatically assumed malingering unless he actually saw a death certificate. “I don’t know any more details at present, you can call in later and ask Julie. The point is, she won’t be coming with you on your rounds today, so don’t waste time waiting for her. Thank you, bye.”
Chris put the phone down. Oh, he thought.
There was, of course, an outside chance that it really was an accident—yes, but she’s a demon, they’re notoriously hard to damage, probably don’t even have accidents. In which case—
In which case, he caught himself thinking, I’m off the hook. They’ve finally got to her, and it’s over.
No, of course he wasn’t proud of himself for thinking that. It was a terrible thing to think, it was pathetic. On the other hand, there was no way it could possibly be his fault, and he’d never asked to be involved, he’d never even been formally told he was involved; damn it, he wasn’t even sure he’d believed SatNav when she told him he was involved, so maybe he wasn’t, after all. Yes, it was terribly sad that Angela was lying in a hospital bed with tubes up her nose, because no man is an island and he cared, he did really, even if she was a demon. But if it meant that this whole annoying, terrifying business was over, then—
“Whoopee,” he said.)
There was nothing he personally could do about it except get on with his life and honour her memory by selling a whole load of tat to today’s assortment of hardly unsuspecting punters. It’s what she’d have wanted, he assured himself as he locked the front door behind him. On his way to the car, he did a little dance.
(Think about the human race, he ordered himself, but he wasn’t listening. It sounded rather too much like think about the ozone layer or think about the baby penguins in Antarctica, and he dismissed it. Pathetic, but consistent.)
There were days, even now, when Chris actually enjoyed driving; when the sun was shining, the road was relatively clear and free of dangerous lunatics and he was on his way to a shop he liked, or where the buyer was unusually gullible. Or when a weight had been taken off his mind, a threat rolled back, something like that. On this occasion, all these factors were in place. He caught himself grinning as he zoomed down the outside lane of the motorway. He felt relaxed, empowered, in control. Presumably, he thought, Jeremy Clarkson feels this way all the time, and why the hell not?
Not wearing
the polo shirt today, mostly because he’d worn it two days in a row already and it was starting to get noisome; as soon as it emerged from the laundry basket he’d get rid of it.
Give it back to Jill? For the first time since he could remember, he wasn’t actively looking forward to the next time he saw her. That thought made him frown.
Without thinking, he reached for the radio switch, then caught himself at it and hesitated. The gap on the windscreen, where SatNav used to sit—good riddance, he told himself. (But it was rather in the manner of President Bush announcing progress in the war against terror; absolutely nobody was going to believe it, least of all himself, but it was something he felt he was obliged to say.) If she’d been telling him the truth about Angela, presumably SatNav no longer, had any reason to be interested in him, and would leave him alone. Good, he told himself, in the same my-fellow-Americans voice he’d used earlier. Don’t want anything more to do with her.
So why shouldn’t he play the radio? That other stuff she’d told him—elves who got into your head via music; the other one, his instincts told him, was a campanologist’s delight. But it might be worth checking it out, if he could get the Book to cooperate; and in the meanwhile, no music.
Chris sighed, because that meant either Radio 4 or silence, in which he’d be able to hear himself think. Difficult choice. He consulted the clock, and saw it was the time of day when John Humphrys ritually sacrifices a Cabinet minister. Fine, he thought, wouldn’t mind hearing someone else being given a hard time. He tuned in. The combination of baying interviewer and whimpering victim proved pleasantly soothing, and his mild euphoria returned.
He ran through the day’s calls in his mind. Nothing too heavy: five shops with a lot of driving in between. A restful day. He deserved it.
The secretary of state for whatever it was had finally been put out of his misery, and it was time for a news summary. Chris turned up his attention level a bit, as he always did, in case a customer felt like making small talk about some leading issue of the day. All off-a-duck’s-back stuff, either boring or foreign, except for one item—
Police (said the radio) were investigating an explosion that had completely destroyed a shop in Stafford; they were refusing to rule out possible terrorist involvement, although why terrorists should want to blow up a shop selling party games and conjuring tricks was unclear. The police were anxious to trace the shop’s proprietor, Mr John Woden, who had not been seen since the incident. They were also anxious to interview the driver of a pale blue Avensis seen parked outside the shop shortly before the blast.
Shit, Chris thought; and in the second and a half that followed, his mind entertained a surprisingly large number of possible courses of action, ranging from handing himself in at the nearest police station to buying a large tin of black paint and finding a quiet lay-by. Dismissing all the above with a nervous scowl, he tried to think. Who, he asked himself, would want to blow up Honest John’s shop? Two leading candidates: demons, and Honest John himself (to make the demons think he was dead)—
Like I care, Chris thought. First things first: he had to do something to get the bogies off his back, if he didn’t want to find himself waiting in a police cell while the office junior poured black coffee into the duty solicitor. Under ordinary circumstances, rather a big ask. Wasn’t it fortunate, therefore, that he had a direct line to someone who could arrange that for him without so much as breaking a fingernail?
He found a lay-by, pulled out his phone and called Jill’s number. Mercifully, she was there.
“It was me,” he told her, after a brief summary of the back-story. “Just doing my usual rounds. Sold him quite a bit, as it happens.”
“Right,” Jill replied. “And nothing funny was going on while you were there?”
Chris hesitated for a fraction of a second. If John’s shop was rubble, John himself missing and Angela unavailable for comment, who else was there to contradict him? And it’d save an awful lot of tedious explaining. “Nothing at all,” he said. “Just a routine call, and then I left. Only,” he added, trying to sound bored and mildly stressed, “I just haven’t got the time or the patience to go through it all with the police. I mean, they’re bound to ask me what line of business I’m in. Isn’t there a convention about that? About keeping quiet about the business to mundanes, I mean?”
“Of course,” Jill replied promptly. “No, there’s no question of you talking to the cops. I’ll see to it that the investigation’s passed to our lot. And I’ll get them to pull the lookout call for your car. Oh, and thanks for letting me know.” Pause; then, “You’re sure there wasn’t anything fishy going on there?”
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
Which didn’t answer her question, and therefore didn’t strictly speaking constitute a second lie. “Fair enough,” Jill . replied. “If you get any bother, call me.”
“One other thing.” Now, what had possessed him to say that? Still, he’d said it now. “You know that Angela, the trainee—”
“Yes, I heard about it. Nasty business.”
Oh, Chris thought. “I just heard there’d been an accident.”
“Accident?” Jill barked out a laugh. “Hardly.”
“What happened?”
“Demons,” Jill said briskly. “Four or five, possibly. I’ll say this for her, she must’ve put up one hell of a fight.”
There are some questions you really don’t want to ask. “Is she—?”
“Dead,” Jill said. “Sorry, I thought you’d have known.”
“Oh.”
A silence, tactful, embarrassed, a bit of both. “She took two of them with her,” Jill said. “Hell of a mess. It took two of our response teams just to seal the interdimensional rift.” Another pause, then: “Were you, like, sort of close—?”
“What? Christ, no. Actually, I didn’t like her much. It’s just a bit of a shock, that’s all.”
It occurred to Chris that nothing either of them had said indicated any knowledge of who or what Angela had really been. Probably better that way, he thought, and left it at that.
Instead he said, “Do you think there could be a connection? Between Angela and Honest—that shop in Stafford?”
“Well, yes, of course,” Jill said. “There’s you. But whether it means anything I couldn’t possibly say at this stage.”
“Thanks a lot, Jill, that really sets my mind at rest.”
Sigh. “Just keep your head down, all right? And if I hear anything at all, I’ll call you ASAP. Keep your phone switched on at all times.”
“Even more thanks. For crying out loud, Jill,” he added, “next thing, you’ll be telling me to lock all doors and boil my drinking water.”
“Not a bad idea,” Jill replied gravely. “Got to go. Bye, and thanks again.”
Chris got back into the car, picked a CD at random from the glove box, stuffed it in the tray and started the engine. One less worry, he told himself: at least I’m not liable to be arrested as well as torn in pieces or dragged through an interdimensional rift. Oddly enough, he did find that comforting. In spite of everything, he still wasn’t a hundred per cent sure he believed in demons, but the police were depressingly real.
He was disagreeably surprised, therefore, when a police car pulled him over ten minutes later; he hadn’t been speeding, his brake lights and tyres were beyond reproach, and he had nothing to be afraid of, in theory.
There were two of them, a huge man and a short, grim woman. They arrested Chris in connection with the murder of Angela Schlager, loaded him into their car and drove him to a police station.
Chris knew the drill from cop shows—remarkably accurate, his hat off to them—but that didn’t make it any better. Once he’d been processed (isn’t that what they do to cheese, he asked himself, to deprive it of any vestige of identity) they dumped him in a cell and left him there, presumably to reflect on his moral shortcomings until they could excavate him a lawyer.
Human beings are made up of mind and heart. Chris�
��s mind was pretty relaxed about the whole thing; after all, the simple fact was that he hadn’t done it, so how could he possibly be in any real danger? The lawyer would come, he’d be questioned, they’d find out that at the time of the murder he’d been miles away with a perfect alibi, they’d turn him loose with apologies for any inconvenience, and that’d be that. Laughable misunderstanding, and, as a way of passing an afternoon, marginally better than work. Or, if not that, then Jill would turn up, with her official ID and supervening jurisdiction, and they’d have a drink in the pub before she drove him home. It was going to be all right. Really.
His heart wasn’t so easily fooled. He had no idea when the bloody woman (how quickly she’d metamorphosed from tragic victim to insufferable pest) had managed to get herself killed, but the chances were that at the time in question Chris had either been on the road or at home alone in the flat. Furthermore, he had no idea where she’d been snuffed. If he could prove that he’d been on a call at the time, a hundred miles away from the crime scene, then fine. If it had happened just round the corner from where he’d been, he was probably in severe poo. And Jill—he was beginning to have his doubts about her. Heresy, yes, but having your trouser belt and shoelaces confiscated by the Vogons plays funny tricks on your judgement.
The best he could find to say about his cell was that it was very clean and white. There was a bed to lie down on—that or the floor, take your pick—with a splendid view of the ceiling, which was also clean and white: a cross between a bathroom and a starship, he decided, but hardly cosy. Lacks the homely touch, he thought, adding that if he ever managed to get out of there he’d never moan about Karen’s carpets-and-curtains fixation again. Anything, even peach-painted woodchip and tapestry scatter cushions, had to be better than this.
