May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  Chris closed his eyes, mostly to keep from being dazzled by the hideous whiteness of it all, and tried to think of something nice. Nothing came immediately to mind, so he set about constructing a synthetic perfect memory. How about—?

  A day off work, always a good starting point. The deep blue sea, lazily washing against an apron of sand the colour of perfect fish batter. Seagulls circling in a cloudless sky. The distant laughter of happy children—

  Just a moment, he thought, this isn’t my daydream, I hate bloody beach holidays. I want a saloon bar, a sodding great big wide-screen TV showing the footie, a tall frosted pint, dry-roasted peanuts... But the sea carried on rolling serenely in, a happy dog scampered after a tennis ball, a fat child kicked in another fat child’s sandcastle, and Karen asked him for the suntan lotion, which he’d forgotten to bring. He got spoken to for that; he apologised but he might as well have saved his breath, and a sulk gradually formed, welling up out of the sand like a soft mist.

  Fine, Chris thought, screw this, I’ll have the cell back now, please.

  He opened his eyes. Still the beach. Karen was lying on her stomach, her face turned pointedly away. There was a pebble digging into the small of his back.

  Not real, he told himself; you’re in a cell in a police station, accused of a crime you didn’t commit, and any moment now they’ll come and take you to a small, bleak room with a wobbly table and ask you nastily deceptive questions. Quite definitely you’re not on a beach being sulked at. Just reach out with your hand and touch the floor tiles if you don’t believe me.

  So he did that. Sand. He scooped up a half-handful and let it run through his fingers.

  Oh hell, he thought. Just when you think it can’t get any worse.

  “This is no good,” Karen said, still facing away. “You know what I’m like when I burn. You can bloody well go back to the car and fetch the suntan lotion.”

  “Of course,” Chris said, “you’re absolutely right. Remind me where we parked.”

  She wriggled round and faced him. Her all right: that what-are-you-talking-about face was uniquely hers. “In the car park, of course,” she said. “Don’t you remember?”

  He smiled and tried to stand up. No problems. “Keys?”

  “In your pocket.”

  He was wearing shorts. He never wore shorts, because there was too much misery in the world as it was. In the pocket of his shorts were the car keys, which he distinctly remembered handing over to the desk sergeant.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Which way’s the car park?”

  Karen scowled at him. “Left at the sea wall, then right by the post office. I told you to wear a hat, but you never listen.”

  OK, not real; but in the real world they’d taken his car keys away from him, an act of symbolic castration that he bitterly resented. And it was real enough for the sand to feel squidgy between his toes ( “Well, put your shoes on, then”), real enough to walk on. He tried to calculate the dimensions of his cell: four paces and he should be banging his nose on the steel door. Apparently not. He walked slowly on up the beach, past the piglike pink carcasses of sunbathers and kiddies howling because they’d dropped their ice creams, until he reached the sea wall.

  “End program,” Chris said aloud. A middle-aged woman looked at him.

  Beyond the wall, pavement, a road, on the far side of which were shops, burger stalls, a pub with people sitting outside. Chip papers, discarded burger boxes. He tried to identify the place—if it was just an illusion, it’d be logical for it to be set in one of his own memories—but he was absolutely sure he’d never been there before. And he had his car keys; they were in his hand, he could feel the chill of the metal.

  He was aware of his heart beating very fast. So, he thought, define ‘real’. Or, better still, quantify the concept real enough.

  The car. He turned left, carried on walking until he saw a post office; right-hand turning next to it, he took that, fifty yards and there was a car park, rows of windscreens shimmering like lakes in the perfect sun. He stopped and looked at the keys in his hand. He’d know them anywhere, down to the pattern of the serrations, and of course the Wallis and Grommit key fob. His keys; therefore, logically, his car; a pale blue Avensis— And there it was.

  Remember first love, when you could look at a crowded room and only see one face? Same effect, basically. There must’ve been several hundred cars in the park, but he could only see one. He moaned softly, and broke into a run.

  Chris touched the door, warm from the sun and gloriously solid. He pressed the little button and heard the click as the doors unlocked. Inside it was greenhouse-hot, and it smelt of warm vinyl and air freshener. His car—

  He sat in the driver’s seat and tried to breathe. His car, undeniably real; in which case, so was everything else—beach, sand, flip-flops, Karen—and he was free and clear, safe, out of it all. He remembered something, and checked the rear-view mirror stem. No dangling plastic hummingbird. He flipped open the glove compartment; a bottle of suntan lotion and a few of Karen’s CDs. So far, so—

  He looked at the windscreen. Suckered to it by its rubber plunger thing was SatNav: whole, uncleaved by enchanted blade, just as she used to be before all the weirdness started.

  Right, Chris thought. Now we’re getting somewhere.

  He checked that her lead was plugged into the lighter socket, then pressed her little button. The screen lit up. She said, “Please wait.”

  “SatNav,” he whispered. “Is that you?”

  A long, long silence. Then she said, “Please enter your required destination.”

  He frowned. “Not now, please,” he said. “I need to ask you something.”

  He waited. No reply. Then he thought, sod it, music, she needs music before she can talk to me. He scrabbled a CD out of a case, flipped open the drawer and slotted it in. ‘Shake It Loose’, by the Lizard-Headed Women.

  Oh all right, then, he thought, if you absolutely must. But I’m turning the volume down. “Hello,” she said. “Is that really you?”

  “Yes. Please state your desired destination. Or would you rather just chat?”

  “Listen,” he said. “All this. Is it real?”

  Pause. “I think so,” SatNav said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “You think so,” Chris repeated impatiendy. “All right, how about this. Where am I?”

  “Weymouth.”

  “Weymouth?“

  “Yes. I can be more specific if you—”

  “What the hell am I doing in Weymouth, SatNav? Last I knew, I was in a police cell.”

  “This is your summer holiday,” SatNav replied. “You’ve been looking forward to it.”

  “Have I?”

  “Of course. You treasure the opportunity to spend quality time with your wife.”

  “Actually, she isn’t—” he said automatically, but stopped himself; couldn’t be bothered explaining right now. “So how did I get here from the police cell? Someone rescued me, right?”

  Pause. “You would like me to retro-plot the route you took in order to arrive here. Please wait. Your route is being calculated.”

  Chris waited, while the Lizard-Headed Women finally ran out of things to say about the human condition. At last the screen flickered and showed him a map: a red line running across the country, from his home to the south coast.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Come on, SatNav, how did I get here? You must know. I mean—”

  “Your route is being calculated, please wait.”

  Same again; at least, it was a slightly different route, avoiding major roadworks on the A303, but it amounted to the same thing. He stared at it for ten seconds.

  “SatNav,” he said, with a kind of frantic patience, “I think you’re missing the point. What I need to know is—”

  The words had an effect on him. Not the ringing of a bell, as in the cliché; it was more like firmly grabbing hold of a bit of wire that turns out to be an electric fence. No, he thought, I can’t face
all that again; and besides, it’s not the sort of thing that’d be in there. I mean, it’s not really human knowledge, is it? That’s dates of battles and algebra and the human genome and how to make polymers. And even if it does work—well, personally like that, all it’ll do is tell me about bloody Gandhi. On the other hand—

  The Book was in his jacket pocket (and he clearly remembered handing it over, along with his belt and his car keys). He shrugged, and opened it at random—

  Reality. Reality is the term used to describe the state of affairs normally prevailing, in the absence of supernatural influences, in a logical, mechanical universe subject to scientifically provable laws of physics. Multiple and compound realities coexist simultaneously across the dimensional spectrum, making it impossible to pin down any one perceived state of affairs as the base or default reality. Human beings, simply for convenience, tend to assume that the reality in which they spend all or the majority of their lives must be the base, and this assumption usually functions adequately in the absence of magic or other similar factors. Recent progress in dimensional portal technology threatens to disrupt this comfortable assumption; in particular, the proliferation of lightweight, battery- or solar-powered man-portable transdimensional interfaces, often marketed as labour-saving devices or executive toys. Temporal distortion and time travel can also cause disturbing reality-bending effects. Perhaps the greatest enemy of humanity’s stable perception of reality comes from metadimensional entities such as demons and the Fey, who frequently make use of their dimension-shifting abilities either recklessly or with malicious intent—.

  Clear as mud, Chris thought, and closed the Book; even when it’s working it’s bloody useless. It was mildly encouraging not to be lectured about Gandhi for a change, but the very most he reckoned he’d gleaned from all that was that this whatever-it-was he was in might possibly be just as valid as the one he’d left... He thought about the practicalities of that: stuff like PIN numbers and bank balances, did he have a job in this version of the universe, if he decided to stay here would he be able to bluff his way through or would it be a lifelong episode of Quantum Leap without the assistance of a friendly hologram to guide him? Well, he thought, this is a company car, so presumably I’ve still got my job; and Karen too, of course, mustn’t forget her, and she seems pretty much the same. Your wife, SatNav had called her, and he’d assumed it was the usual conventional jump-to-conclusions, but what if...? Still, he thought, even so it’s got to be better than being in prison. A bit better.

  “SatNav,” he said, “what reality am I in?”

  “Your metaphysical coordinates are being calculated, please wait.” Pause, during which Chris looked for, and found, the emergency Mars Bar hidden in the driver’s-door pocket. “You are currently in reality 001 Alpha.”

  “Oh-oh—?”

  “Normality,” SatNav translated; then added, “What an odd question to ask.”

  “Sorry.” Karen, he thought, waiting impatiently for her sunblock while the murderous heat fried her soft flesh like squid rings. Screw her, he thought, this is important. “Only, the way I remember it, I was on my way to make a call and I got arrested, and they think I murdered Angela, and I was in a cell—”

  “They think you murdered Angela?”

  “Yes, which is bloody ridiculous, because—”

  “Because she isn’t dead.”

  Silence. Frozen on his lips, like mammoths in the Siberian ice, the words she’s dead all right, Mr Burnoz told me. In Chris’s mind, a light suddenly switched on, the realisation that in this reality—he was beginning to like this reality a lot- she might very well be alive, just as he was on holiday rather than in jail.

  “SatNav,” he said cautiously.

  “Yes, Chris?”

  “Just suppose,” he said, his voice soft as prayer, “someone was living in one reality and suddenly found himself in another one, just a tad different. Better, say. Could he stay there, do you think? Permanently?”

  “Entirely possible,” SatNav replied. “Why, are you planning on—?”

  “Lord. No,” he said quickly. “Perish the thought. I like it here.”

  “Of course you do,” SatNav replied. “But now I don’t understand. Why do the police think you murdered Angela if she’s still alive?”

  “Forget I said that,” he mumbled. “Touch of the sun, maybe.” Talking of which; he reached into the glove compartment and got Karen’s suntan lotion. “Oh, one last thing,” he said casually. “Do you happen to know anything about the one who is to come?”

  “The one what, Chris?”

  “Forget it,” he said happily. “Doesn’t matter.”

  On the way back to the beach, he bought an ice cream. He hadn’t had a proper ice cream, on a little wooden stick, for years.

  “Where did you get to?” Karen demanded. “You’ve been ages.”

  “Phone call,” he said smoothly. “Work.”

  “Oh, right.” An acceptable answer, apparently. He handed over the suntan stuff. “You ought to turn that bloody phone off while we’re on holiday.”

  “Good idea,” he said, and did so. “They’ll just have to manage without me.”

  She had no comment to make on that score. He finished his ice cream and lay down, aware that he was smiling but seeing no reason hot to, and closed his eyes. You could get to like beach holidays, he thought.

  “So what was the panic?” Karen said.

  “Oh, just stuff. Customers chasing orders, that kind of thing.”

  She clicked her tongue. “Can’t that half-witted girl of yours handle it? That’s the whole point of having an assistant.”

  “That’s what I told them,” Chris replied.

  Peace, quiet; happiness. The warmth of the sun was making him feel drowsy, but he didn’t really want to fall asleep, just in case he woke up and found it had all been a dream. Though, he told himself, the sun isn’t warm in dreams, and you can’t smell salt and warm sand and suntan lotion.

  “By the way,” Karen said, “where is she?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I said, where is she?”

  “Where’s who?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He heard her yawn, and then say, “I’m just going over there for a bit. Be back soon.”

  “That’s fine,” Chris answered drowsily. The glare on his closed eyelids dimmed a little as her shadow fell across him. He snuggled his back into the sand. It’d be very easy indeed to fall asleep, and why not? But the thought made him uncomfortable, and he opened his eyes. The sun was annoyingly bright. What I need, he thought, is sunglasses.

  Luckily, there was a pair in his jacket pocket. He looked at them, trying to remember where he’d got them from. They looked old-fashioned and rather strange, but they worked perfectly well. He sat up, yawned and stretched.

  “I’m about ready for some lunch,” Karen said behind him. “Coming?”

  “Mphm.” He stood up, turned to face her—

  Chris didn’t scream. He didn’t make a sound of any kind, because his throat, mouth and lungs had got stuck, and the full-blooded yell he wanted to let fly with couldn’t get out. Later, he realised that what had really freaked him out was the fact that the three-eyed, grey-skinned, four-tusked, pointed-eared, noseless, drooling monster facing him was wearing Karen’s light blue bikini, a garment of which he had very fond memories, and for a split second he was afraid that the demon had eaten her and stolen her clothes.

  “I’m starving,” the demon said, in Karen’s exact voice. “Let’s go.”

  But that wasn’t what had happened; because if the demon had just eaten—

  “You go ahead,” Chris said. “I think I’ll just stay here a bit longer.”

  Given the demon’s facial layout, you couldn’t really tell if it was scowling or not. But the voice told him everything he wanted to know. “You don’t want to have lunch with me?”

  “Not terribly hungry.”

  “Fine.” The enduring-with-bad-grace voice. “I’ll have
to wait, then. Will you be ready in half an hour?”

  He wanted to look away, but he didn’t dare break eye contact; so he took the sunglasses off. It helped; he couldn’t see the demon any more, just Karen in the blue bikini, glowering at him. “On second thoughts,” he said, “let’s go now. I could really fancy fish and—”

  “We’ll go back to the hotel and change,” she said firmly. “Then I thought we could try that Mexican place we saw last night.”

  Chris tried to think of a strategy, but all that came to mind was getting to the car, locking the doors and driving away very fast. He could see all sorts of objections, but it was the best he could do at short notice, with his synapses fused with revulsion and fear. The only other course of action he could think of was getting out the pantacopt and trying to kill the demon, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to do that, for all sorts of reasons.

  They reached the sea wall. He turned left.

  “Where do you think you’re going? It’s this way.”

  She was pointing right; they wouldn’t be going anywhere near the car park after all. He choked back a whimper. Make a run for it? He knew that his legs wouldn’t hold out; they were only just keeping him upright as it was. Going back to the hotel room definitely not an option. Stand and fight, then.

  Chris shuddered. So much he didn’t know, for one thing. If you cut a shape-shifted demon in half with a pantacopt, did it revert to its real form, or vanish into thin air, or would he be left standing on Weymouth beach with two bisected halves of a dead woman to account for to the authorities? Not that it’d come to that, he knew; he’d cock it up somehow, either let her get the weapon away from him or cut off his own legs. Nothing for it, then, but to go quietly—

  Out of the corner of his eye, a glimpsed impression: stormtrooper black, body armour, a fetishist’s dream of an equipment belt. The police. He turned his head and spotted them: two coppers, a big tall man and a short woman, doing that slow walk perfectly described as proceeeding. Well, he thought sadly, anything’s better than death.