by Tom Holt
“Don’t sound so surprised,” she replied huffily. “You can’t expect to win at everything just because you’re a man.”
Next turn he missed again, and she didn’t; yet another burning sensation. Paul flexed his fingers nervously, but didn’t say anything. Three turns later the game was over. She’d guessed all his squares without missing once, and he hadn’t guessed any of hers. Each time, too, he’d felt the slight shock running up his fingernail out of the photograph.
“Here,” she demanded, “let me see your grid. If you’ve been letting me win out of some bloody stupid notion of chivalry—”
He handed it over without a word. She looked at it, and her eyes gleamed; clearly, she enjoyed winning. “Let’s have another game,” she said. “I like this.”
So they played another game, and another one after that, each time with exactly the same results. After a fourth game (same outcome), they looked at each other.
“That’s so weird,” she said.
He hesitated for a moment; then he told her about the electric-shock thing. At first she looked like she hadn’t believed him. Then she frowned.
“The stupid thing is,” she said, “when I’m choosing squares, it’s like I just know. Sometimes I don’t even bother to look, it’s like I hear the grid number in my head and repeat it.” A curious look crept onto Paul’s face. “And before you ask,” she added, “no, I don’t do the Lottery or bet on horse races.”
“Maybe you should.”
She shook her head. “I’ve never won on anything like that in my life,” she said. “And I can’t bend spoons, either, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She stopped and frowned. “How about you?”
“Nothing doing on either score,” Paul said. “Here, do you think there really might be bauxite under these grid squares?”
She didn’t answer; but she handed him the green marker pen. “Might as well,” she said. “After all, they’re paying us.”
“Yes, but I thought it was all just a scheme—” He shrugged, and reached for the print he’d just been using, and the tracing-paper grid. By the time he’d finished drawing rings on the pictures, it was one o’clock. Lunch.
That reminded him; he had something very difficult, dangerous and momentous to do right now, but in all the excitement it’d slipped his mind. “You doing anything for lunch?” he asked, as casually as he could, namely not very.
“I’ve got a cheese sandwich and a bottle of tap water. Why?”
“Well,” he said, “to be honest with you, I feel like I need a drink.” Which he did, but not because of the electric shocks or the phantom bauxite. “You coming?”
She frowned. “I don’t drink at lunchtime,” she said.
“Neither do I, generally speaking,” he replied, not mentioning why. “But let’s get out of here, anyway.”
There was a moment. Paul could almost hear the coin rattling as it spun round on its rim.
“All right,” she said.
Choking back the urge to burst out singing ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’, Paul stood up. “We’d better go now,” he said. “Before they lock the door.”
“All right.”
So they went to the little Italian sandwich bar on the corner of the next street down the block. As they stood in line at the counter, it occurred to Paul that if he didn’t want to have to walk home to Kentish Town that night, the most he could afford was a sugar lump; whereupon the thin girl looked at him and said, “My treat.”
“Are you—?”
“Sure, yes. What do you want?”
Paul opted for a ham roll and a coffee; the thin girl ordered the same, minus the ham roll. They sat perched on bar stools in a corner. As far as Paul was concerned, it was rather more unreal than the electric shocks, or the claw-mark, or even the sword in the stone. Here he was, he realised, alone in a food establishment with a girl; not just that, but the girl he most wanted to be with. (Talk about coincidences.) Bizarre round eyes peering at him through letter boxes he could more or less take in his stride, but this was unnerving.
“Well,” he said.
“Well what?” She had a spot of cappuccino foam on the tip of her nose; Cartier and Fabergé never designed such an exquisite ornament. He couldn’t help thinking that this girl seemed to have an uncanny knack of reading his thoughts; and yet, here she was.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s all a bit strange, isn’t it?”
She waggled her eyebrows very slightly. Suddenly, Paul wished he was in Australia, or somewhere equally far away.
“By the way,” she said abruptly, “I’m Sophie. It’s a horrible name and I hate it.”
“I’m Paul,” Paul replied. “Pleased to meet you.”
She smiled, just a crack, but enough for a sliver of light to get through.
“I don’t like Paul much, either,” he went on. “My dad says Paul was the name of the doctor who delivered me. Mum’s under the impression she named me after Paul McCartney. I’ve always reckoned Paul must be the word for ‘idiot’ in some language that everybody else knows except me.”
“It’s an all-right sort of name,” she said equably. “In a nothingish sort of way.”
Paul shrugged. “I’d have preferred John,” he said. “Or George, or probably even Ringo. What about you?”
“Oh, some great aunt, I think,” she replied. “There was another girl called Sophie in my class at primary school. I couldn’t stand her.”
Paul nodded. “I was the only Paul in my class,” he said. “Loads of Tonys and Andys and Chrises, we even had a couple of Julians.”
“It was all Carolines and Emmas where I was. A couple of Pauls. I can’t remember much about them.”
“We had one poor kid called Galadriel,” Paul remembered. “That’d be a horrible thing to do to anybody, let alone your own flesh and blood.”
The thin girl (no, he corrected himself: Sophie) frowned slightly; clearly she hadn’t got the reference, but wasn’t about to admit it by asking. That seemed to be about as far as names were going to get them. “So,” Paul said, “apart from the weirdness, what do you think of it so far?”
“Very boring,” she said. “I mean, all those stupid printout things. And I was rubbish at doing them, which made it worse, of course.”
Paul didn’t comment on that. “I take it this isn’t exactly your idea of a rich, fulfilling career.”
“No.”
“What is?”
She scowled. “I don’t know,” she said. “Truth is, I don’t really want to do anything much. Oh, I want to do something, I just don’t know what yet. Obviously,” she went on, “money doesn’t matter, or any of that sort of rubbish. And obviously I want to do something that helps make the world a better place. I thought about social work or becoming a doctor so I could go to Africa, or pottery, or joining a group of travellers, something like that, you know, a statement. But when I got right down to it, there didn’t seem to be any point. The fact is, I’m not really very good at anything, and I can’t stand doing things I’m bad at. And that only left, well, rubbish sort of jobs. And my mum and dad still think I’m going to get married and have kids, so obviously they’re no help. Which is how I ended up here, I suppose.”
Paul grinned. “Sounds like you’re a bit more organised than me, even so. You see, when I was a kid it was nice and simple, there was playtime and then there was other stuff, and you had to eat up all the other stuff before you could have any pudding, if you see what I mean. And that’s basically how I’ve carried on ever since. The only difference is, when I was a kid I always knew what I wanted to play next, there was always some game or some toy or whatever. These days, I sit at home in the evenings watching the garbage on telly. Very boring, but at least it’s not work.”
She looked at him. “So work’s always got to be horrible and nasty, then?”
“Not necessarily,” he replied. “Obviously, some people like it. Actually, of the people I was at school with, I can think of two of them who really like
what they’re doing—you know, they live for their jobs, like they’re seamlessly merged into what they do, to the point where it sort of defines who they are.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Sophie objected.
“Not in theory,” Paul said. “But of those two, one of them’s an estate agent, and the other one works in an abattoir.”
Shortly after that, to Paul’s great surprise, it was three minutes to two and high time they were getting back to the office. They had to walk quickly, and it’d come on to rain while they’d been in the café. Sophie, he noticed, was capable of moving very fast without showing any signs of it; he found it hard to keep up with her simply by walking along, but breaking into a trot would have made him look ridiculous.
They reached the door just as it swung open. The receptionist (Paul hadn’t seen her before; he’d have remembered if he had) smiled at them as they shot past her.
“Have you noticed,” Sophie muttered as they climbed the stairs, “how there’s always someone different on reception?”
Paul nodded. “But they always say hello like they know who I am,” he said.
On the landing, they ran into Mr Suslowicz. He looked tired and harassed, though he beamed at them both and asked them how they were getting on. Paul replied, “Oh, fine,” or something like that. Mr Suslowicz asked if either of them had seen the long stapler, but they said they hadn’t. He shrugged, grinned and disappeared into the photocopier room.
Julie was waiting for them when they reached their office. She was standing by the desk, looking at the green rings Paul had drawn on the photographs. “You’ve been busy,” she said.
Paul wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Is that how they wanted it done?” he asked.
Julie nodded. “Looks all right as far as I can see,” she said. “But then, it’s not up to me. Anyhow, there’s another batch there for you to look at, and when you’ve done that, Mr Tanner’d like to see you in his room.”
When she’d gone, Paul pulled a face. “Wonderful,” he said.
“You mustn’t let him get to you,” Sophie replied briskly. “Remember the rissoles.”
Paul shook his head. “It’s all very well saying rissoles,” he said, “but that bloke gives me the horrors. He reminds me of something.”
She nodded. “He’s the spitting image of the goblin on page seven of my fairy-tale book,” she said. “The one who ate naughty children. I used to have nightmares.”
“Makes you wonder what was in the rissoles,” Paul said gloomily.
They divided the photos between them and went over them in silence, taking the job seriously; but Paul didn’t get any more electric shocks, and Sophie simply stared blankly at each print in turn before adding it to the pile. The green marker pen stayed where it was in the middle of the desk.
“Well,” Sophie said, when they’d done the last one. “Suppose we’d better go.”
Paul stood up and opened the door; and as he did so, he realised something was different. There were coats behind it, his and hers.
“How did that—?” Sophie began to say. Paul pushed the coats aside, and there under them was a shiny new brass coat hook. Also, he couldn’t help noticing that, although there wasn’t any wet paint or sign of any other repair activity, the claw-mark had completely disappeared.
FIVE
That night, after a rather gloomy meal of sardines on toast and mousetrap Cheddar, Paul had a strange dream. It was strange because in it he wasn’t being chased down long, dark corridors by maths teachers or vulture-headed aunts, he didn’t find himself doing the reading at morning assembly wearing only a dunce’s cap, he wasn’t sitting an A level in classical Sanskrit, and no curly-headed young men in Victorian costume came gatecrashing at the end.
Instead, he was sitting in an office, which for some reason he knew belonged to John Wells, the senior partner he’d never seen. It was huge, with a high, ornate ceiling and a splendid bay window looking out over the rooftops of the City of London; the desk was a football pitch of shimmering figured French walnut, and the Persian rug on which it stood would’ve paid for a small hospital or five minutes of Julia Roberts’s time on the silver screen. One of the paintings on the wall was an unrecorded Vermeer (Paul wouldn’t have been able to tell a Vermeer from an optician’s chart when he was awake), and the other, a plain canvas with a dab of Prussian blue in one corner and three dried baked beans in the other, was less than a year old and worth twice as much. In a glass case beside the door lay a priceless seventeenth-century Pappenheim rapier, a Gutenberg Bible, a candle in a massive thirteenth-century parcel-gilt candlestick, a rather gaudy silver Victorian handbell, and a plain gold ring. Apart from seven telephones, all different colours, a framed sepia photograph of a man in a top hat and frock coat and a birdcage with its door open, the desktop was bare. Paul was sitting in a large Gothic chair, which he had an idea was made of ivory. In his left hand, he held a cup of lapsang tea.
Cool, he thought. The dream seemed reluctant to let him in on how he came to be there, but he knew that it was his office now, and had been for some time. The only drawback he could see was that the soles of his shoes had at some point been stapled to the floor, which meant he couldn’t move his feet.
Across the desk from him was another, much plainer chair, and in it sat a goblin; he knew it was a goblin, because there’d been a picture of one in Sophie’s fairy-tale book, and this one was identical in every respect, apart from the fact that it was wearing a grey silk Italian suit and an inappropriate tie. The goblin was holding a spiralbound notebook and a pencil and looking at him expectantly. He was, he realised, in the middle of dictating a letter.
“Right,” Paul said. “Could you just read that back to me?”
The goblin nodded and recited, in a soft, purring female voice that would’ve played hell with his libido if it hadn’t been filtered through a mouthful of long, yellow teeth: “Dear sir, we thank you for your letter of the seventeenth inst and note what you say. However, in the circumstances now prevailing we feel that we cannot agree with your analysis of the situation, and must therefore regretfully decline your esteemed offer. We beg to remain, et cetera.”
Buggery, Paul thought; what’s all that about? ‘Fine’, he heard himself say. “Get that in tonight’s post, would you? First class.” The goblin stood up, Paul handed it the teacup, and it left the room, silently closing the door behind it.
Now there was a computer on the desk. He snapped his fingers (Paul couldn’t snap his fingers) and the screen filled with figures. He stared at them for a while, then reached out with his forefinger and traced down the columns one by one, until a familiar tingling stopped him. He wrote down some numbers on the notepad that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier, then pressed a buzzer on the side of the desk. The goblin came back.
“Ask Scuffy to pop up and see me,” Paul said. “Oh, and would you mind nipping down and seeing if those bauxite scans are ready yet. I’ll need them for Thursday afternoon’s meeting, and Rick’ll need a few days to check them out.”
“Right away,” the goblin purred. This time Paul didn’t see it go, because he was preoccupied with more figures on the computer screen; he was listening as well as reading, as if they were some kind of musical notation, and the computer was somehow sending the music they represented straight to his brain, without having to bother with passing it in through his ears. Then the door opened and someone came and sat down in the chair. “You wanted to see me, Jack,” someone said, but he couldn’t place the voice, or even tell if it was male or female.
“Have a look at this,” Paul replied, swivelling the VDU round so it faced the other chair. “Third column, fifth line. What do you make of it?”
Whoever it was didn’t reply. Paul had known in advance that he or she wouldn’t. He felt extremely tense, as though knowing the coming interview was going to be awkward and painful.
“You know what I think?” he heard himself say. “Well, of course you do, you aren’t stupid, and we
both know what I’m talking about. Mostly, I’m just curious to see if you’ve got anything to say for yourself.”
“Would it make any difference?” the voice asked.
“No,” said Paul, “except I’d really like to know why. It seems such a strange thing to do.”
“To you, maybe. Not to me.”
He sighed, because here came the really nasty bit, the part he’d been dreading. Before he could say anything, however, a door materialised in the opposite wall, between the Vermeer and the modern abstract. He watched it form; first the door frame and lintel appeared as thin grey pencil outlines on the pale silk wallpaper, and then their contours and decorative mouldings were fleshed out with lines of shadow, making them three-dimensional, and then the panels, hinges and round brass handle of the door grew up out of the wall like speeded-up mushrooms. He realised that he was staring and looked away, while keeping the new door under observation through the corner of his eye. It opened, and two very old men in black pinstripes crept in, trying not to make any noise; one of them put his forefinger to his lips and silently mouthed Hush! He deliberately didn’t look at them as they tiptoed past him and stood behind his chair.
“They’re here, aren’t they?” said the voice from the other chair.
“What makes you think that?”
“I can feel them hating me. But that’s all right. In fact, I’m glad they’re here. Say hello to them for me, if you like.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Nothing ridiculous about it at all. You know as well as I do, they can’t come back home without him, and we’re the only ones who know where he is. You,” the voice added meaningfully, “and me.”
He had no idea why; but Paul didn’t like that at all. “Are you threatening me?” he said.
The voice laughed. “Hardly,” it said. “A threat is a promise of unpleasant action that stands some chance of happening; if I threaten you with something that we both know will never happen, it can’t be a proper threat. You aren’t stupid either,” the voice went on, enjoying itself. “You don’t want him back any more than I do; and so long as he’s away, they can’t come through. But that’s by the by; it’s not a threat, because I’m not going to turn him loose, because you aren’t going to do anything that’d make me take such an unfortunate step. Do we understand each other?”
