Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  Meanwhile: ‘How would you react,’ the man called Dave was asking him, ‘to the guys in the media who’ve been saying all along that your leadership style’s been too laid back and sloppy and you didn’t train nearly hard enough and that really, you’ve let down the fans back home who actually believed you could pull it off?’

  Paul grinned. ‘Like this,’ he said, and with a single sweep of his arm, he sliced Dave’s head off with the sword and watched it sail across the room, bounce off the opposite wall and land with absolute precision in a small metal dustbin. Quite a few of the cameramen cheered, and someone let off an air-horn.

  Smiling, Paul stood up and walked away. Outside the glaring circle of the studio lights it was dark and cool, and he was feeling quite tired. Goblins, he thought; bless them. It stood to reason that at a goblin party you had to have beautiful girls jump up out of a cake and attack you with savage weapons, just as the goblin idea of your past life flashing in front of your eyes at the point of death was inevitably a Grandstand interview. He was also absolutely convinced, though he had no data on the subject, that goblinkind’s favourite TV show was Benny Hill, but Forrest Gumped with cutting-edge computer-graphics technology to include scenes of gratuitous slaughter. My relatives, he told himself. Devious, vulgar and blessed with a degree of cunning that it was fatally easy to underestimate, but flawed nevertheless with the assumption that everyone was like them, deep down. Outside the immediate confines of the genome, however, they hadn’t got a clue.

  Of course, he reflected as he walked further into the darkness, he did have the fairly unique advantage of having died twice already. Arguably, if he didn’t have that rather unusual insight, which quite possibly they weren’t aware of, it was quite likely that he would believe he’d just been killed, and that this was the underworld, the afterlife, the kingdom of the dead. In any event, he felt he’d established beyond reasonable doubt that that was what they wanted him to think. Which led on to the thorny question, why? What good was it doing them, and how could it possibly be relevant to the christening of baby Paul Azog?

  Paul wrestled with that one for a while, but try as he might he couldn’t find a satisfactory answer, so he shelved the question and began to speculate about what might happen next. Not that it mattered. After all, none of this was real, so none of it mattered. He knew it wasn’t real, because he knew precisely what the realm of the dead looked like: dark, flat, featureless, neither hot nor cold, dry nor wet, nothing so positive; and after a while, when you got bored with strolling across a blank canvas, you came to the entrance to the Bank of the Dead, where Mr Dao would be waiting to greet him—

  ‘Paul?’

  The voice was familiar. He looked round, trying to see where it was coming from, but realised that he was completely disorientated in this dark, flat, featureless landscape.

  Pause. Rewind. Freeze.

  Come to think of it, he muttered to himself, it’s also neither cold nor hot, wet nor dry. And the voice he’d just heard was that of Benny Shumway. He opened his mouth to yell, but nothing came out.

  ‘Shit, Paul, I didn’t know,’ Benny’s voice went on. ‘Nobody ever tells me anything around here. Bloody hell, mate, I’m so sorry.’ Hesitation, rather than a pause for a reply. Benny had been here often enough (once a day, to pay in the cheques, draw the petty cash, check the automated credits) to know that the dead can’t answer back or see you, they can only just hear your voice, faint and coming from no particular direction. ‘Well,’ Benny continued awkwardly, ‘I just hope it was painless and quick, and tomorrow I’ll see about bringing you something, a drop of goat’s blood or a bit of raw liver. I really am sorry, chum. You got right up my nose sometimes and I can never forgive you for sending Judy away, but some of the time I actually did quite like you.’

  Benny. Benny, wait for me, get me out of here, there’s been a terrible mistake, don’t go. Paul could just hear an echo of the words inside his own head, but no voice speaking them; really, nothing more than the shape and shadow of the thoughts, and that only because he was so recently arrived. Of course Benny couldn’t hear him, because Benny was still alive.

  Desperately, Paul tried to see something, any damn thing; or hear, or smell, or touch, or taste. No dice. Then, just as he’d found a crumb of reassurance in the fact that he hadn’t seen the Bank or Mr Dao, another familiar voice spoke out of the darkness and spoiled all that for ever.

  ‘Mr Carpenter,’ Mr Dao said. ‘Again. What on earth brings you here?’

  And there he was, exactly the way Paul remembered him: grave, distinguished, almost sympathetic and kindly but not quite. Mr Dao, manager of the Bank, walked out of the absence of light and bowed formally to him.

  ‘Mr Dao. Look, this is wrong. I shouldn’t be here.’

  A gentle glow of pity and understanding in his eyes, deep as an artesian well. ‘Alas,’ Mr Dao said. ‘How often I’ve heard those very words, and always so true. Of course you shouldn’t be here, Mr Carpenter. Nobody should be here. But—’ He shrugged, thin shoulders lifting a little under the deep blue silk of his robes. ‘We all have our cross to bear, Mr Carpenter, and in the end all we can do is make the best of it. You’ll find it isn’t as bad as all that here; we have a bridge club, if you play at all, and a very strong choral society; or you can sign up for an excellent choice of evening classes. Only the other day, for instance, we added flower arranging, conversational Turkish and beginners’-level lawnmower maintenance. I won’t pretend that everything here isn’t agonisingly boring and pointless, but we do make an effort.’

  ‘This is wrong,’ Paul repeated helplessly. This is wrong, it’s just Mr Tanner’s mum and her loathsome relatives playing a stupid trick on me. You aren’t the real Mr Dao, you’re just—

  ‘His ghost.’ Mr Dao smiled wanly. ‘To coin a phrase, this is as real as I get.’ He folded his arms and tucked his hands into his capacious sleeves. ‘Mr Carpenter,’ he said, then made a supreme effort. ‘Paul, if I may. I’m sorry. There has been no mistake. Your name is there on the arrivals board, which is why I came out specially to meet you. There is an explanatory note; it says, “killed by goblins”, if that’s any help to you in understanding the sequence of events. Not that it matters. You must face this fact: as far as you are concerned, nothing matters, nothing will ever matter again. We used to have a banner, Paul, we rigged it out over the front entrance every time new guests arrived until the time-and-motion consultants pointed out that it was depressing and counter-productive and made us throw it away. But I disagree with them. It said: “Abandon hope, all you who enter here”; and I still maintain that it was the best and most constructive advice that can be given to someone in your present situation. You must accept this, Paul; down here, hope is not your friend. There is nothing to hope for here, just as there is nothing to be afraid of. Quite simply, there is nothing. Deal with it.’

  Paul stared at Mr Dao for a moment; then it was as though he’d just woken up out of a particularly vivid and disturbing dream to find himself in his bed, in his red and white striped pyjamas, suddenly and rather foolishly aware that he’d got himself into a dreadful state over nothing at all. Just as the dream fades and gets thin and evaporates as the light bleaches it away, so his memories of having been alive, all the stuff he’d tried to bring with him and now realised that he wouldn’t be needing after all, began to melt and thaw away; because he’d woken up out of a strange and disturbing dream about being alive, but it was all right now, and he knew that it had all been just a—

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘Sorry, but it can’t be like that. I mean, they wouldn’t have killed me, they had no reason to. I was being little Paul Azog’s godfather.’

  Mr Dao was frowning sympathetically, but frowning nonetheless. ‘They’re goblins, Paul,’ he said. ‘That’s reason enough. Human sacrifice is part of their rich cultural heritage. But you mustn’t worry about that any more. The important thing is that you’re here, and this time you’re here to stay. Now I’m prepared
to bend the rules for you a bit until you’ve got yourself settled in, but there is a very definite limit to what I can do; and in a day or so, once you’re acclimatised—’

  ‘No.’ It wasn’t in Paul’s nature to shout at people he didn’t know well, but the circumstances seemed to warrant making an exception. ‘I’m not going to get acclimatised, because I’m not staying. This isn’t happening. I demand to see the manager.’

  Mr Dao only shook his head. ‘I am the manager,’ he said.

  ‘No, you aren’t.’ No, it occurred to Paul to consider, he wasn’t the manager, at that. ‘You’re in charge of the bank, you’re not the government around here. I want to see whoever’s in charge. And that’s not you.’

  Mr Dao smiled wryly. ‘Take me to your leader, in other words. I’m sorry, but we haven’t got one. No need, you see. There’s nobody in charge because there’s nothing to be in charge of. Except the Bank, of course. Please, I must ask you to calm down and try and behave in a rather less unseemly fashion. Perhaps,’ he added, with a friendly gesture, ‘I can get you something to eat or drink. A cup of tea, perhaps, and a plate of mixed biscuits.’

  And maybe it was Paul’s imagination, or maybe as he said that, Mr Dao winked; a tiny flicker of the lid of his logically non-existent eye, a hint—

  Of course. He was still holding the sword.

  You can’t take it with you, they say; but sometimes, Paul realised with a jolt, they lie. He was still holding the sword, with which he’d so lightly and easily decapitated the annoying TV anchorman. As he swung it up and looked at the blade (a deep, rich glowing brown, flecked here and there with swirls and squiggles of vivid silver), he imagined that he saw Mr Dao’s chin dip just a tiny bit, almost as if he was nodding in approval, in confirmation. How could he still have the sword if he was really dead? Vaguely he remembered: Magnus Magnusson or someone like that, telling him through a plate-glass screen that dead Vikings always liked to be buried with their swords, to have something to defend themselves with in the next world. Magnus had made it sound pretty silly, but here he was in the next world, and here was this sword in his hand - a hand he shouldn’t still have; but somehow the realness of the sword was soaking through into his skin. He thought of a film he’d seen once, a sci-fi thing about an invisible man; and they’d caught him by spraying paint about from aerosols. The skin of his hand was real where it touched the sword in the same way that the invisible man’s face could be seen by the infinitesimally thin layer of paint covering it.

  Cool, he thought; and then he took another look at the sword-blade.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Paul said to Mr Dao; then he lifted the blade to his mouth and carefully licked along the line of the cutting edge, feeling his tongue become real again as it touched the cold, smooth metal. There was only a very thin smear of blood there, but he knew from his two previous visits that a tiny, tiny drop of the red stuff was all it took.

  It was as though he was a line drawing in a child’s colouring book, and the child had just coloured him in, gaudily and messily with a broad-nibbed felt-tip pen. He was suddenly so full of life that it was sloshing about inside him like water in a bucket, spilling out of him, dripping off him like wet paint. ‘Sorry,’ he heard himself say, ‘can’t stop. Thanks for everything.’ Mr Dao lifted his hand in a very small wave as Paul spun on his heel - he had heels to spin on once again, wasn’t that amazing? - and sprinted like hell in what he devoutly hoped was the direction of the little postern gate that opened into Benny Shumway’s office.

  As he ran, he worried. He’d been in this position before, of course. There was a door linking the cashier’s room at JWW with the land of the dead; but as soon as Benny got back from his daily trip to the Bank, the door was bolted and locked and chained and barred, and wouldn’t be opened again for twenty-three and a half hours; by which time, the tiny lease of life afforded him by the tiny smear of blood he’d licked off the sword would have expired, and that’d be that. But he’d met Benny not all that long ago, and Benny didn’t run home from doing the banking, he tended to trudge wearily, like a man wading through waist-deep porridge. If he could get to the door before Benny did, he was saved. If not, forget it. Simple as that.

  A bit like running for a train, Paul thought, except that there won’t be another one if I miss this one, not ever. He was running into complete darkness, nothing to navigate by, nothing underfoot even, to confirm that he was moving rather than standing still. That wasn’t a nice thought, but he made an effort and ran faster anyhow; and then there was a tiny point of light, no bigger than a star, which he knew was the glow from the sixty-watt bulb in the cashier’s room, seen through the keyhole. Time for an extra-special effort; because if he could see the light, it was because the door was still unlocked and the keyhole cover hadn’t been swung back. He also yelled, ‘Benny, Benny,’ at the top of his voice, but he couldn’t hear his own words.

  Then there was Benny; briefcase in one hand, big folder of papers wedged under the other arm. There he was, and there was the door, but he was right on the doorstep and Paul was still a hundred yards or a thousand yards or a million miles away, and he wasn’t going to get there in time, because Benny was way too smart to look back over his shoulder when he was in the Kingdom of the Dead. Paul watched him reach for the door handle - his fingers were on the knob, about to turn it; but a couple of sheets of paper slipped out of the folder and drifted to the absence-of-ground, and Benny swore under his breath and stooped to pick them up. ‘BENNY!’ Paul yelled, pounding forward like a racehorse, ‘IT’S ME! BENNY, WAIT FOR—’

  No more than ten yards away now, three strides; but Benny had picked up his papers and turned the door handle and opened the door. At the last moment, Paul shut his eyes tight and leapt like a deer into the blinding rectangle of light—

  And crashed into something profoundly solid, bounced off and landed on his back, stunned and breathless. He lay unable to move, as the sound of bolts and keys and chains and latches crashed and graunched at him through the woodwork. A fraction of a second later he was on his feet again, hammering with both fists against the rough oak panels, howling and yelling and screaming, but he knew he was wasting his time. Benny Shumway hadn’t lasted this long without knowing that this was one door you never answered, no matter what you heard on the other side.

  That was it, then. Screwed.

  Paul slumped to the lack-of-ground, almost too weak to move. The desperate exertion of all that running, yelling and bashing had used up most of his little wispy smear of extra life, and in a few seconds it’d all be gone, and so would he. Suddenly he thought of the sword. Maybe there was an atom or so of blood left on the blade that he’d missed, or maybe the sword, being magical, could cut through two inches of oak like a cake slice through lemon meringue. But the sword wasn’t there; either it had gone through the doorway before Benny shut the door, or Paul had dropped it at some point in his wild dash, out there in the total absence of light, where he’d never find it again even if he had all eternity to look, which he would.

  Fuck, he thought.

  He’d believed he was going to make it, right up to the point where his face slammed into the closed door; he’d been utterly, unshakeably convinced that this wasn’t the end; he’d had the sword, and it wasn’t fair anyhow, being suddenly murdered by goblins when he was the one doing them a favour. If it was the end, why bother giving him the sword and sacrificing the life of a TV presenter just so there’d be blood on it when blood was needed, and why have Benny Shumway there at precisely the critical moment - even the pantomime with the dropped papers - to buy him the essential fraction of a second? But apparently not. Abandon hope, all you who enter here.

  Goblin humour, he thought; round about now, it’d be just his luck to see Jonathan Ross or Barry Norman floating eerily in the gloom - because now’s the time for a frank, trenchant review of my life, now that it’s over, now that the fat lady’s straining for the high notes.

  Conclusions, anyone? First, it was all a waste o
f time, because nothing worthwhile would end this way (massacred by pretty girls jumping out of a cake, leaping headlong into a shut door) Second, if I had my time over again—

  There had been a very brief moment, a split second, when the road of Paul’s life had forked, and he’d had a genuine choice. After Sophie had told him about how Countess Judy had leeched out all her feelings for him, as though they’d never existed, Sophie had made him a remarkable and genuine offer. She’d said that if he wanted her to, she would drink the justly celebrated JWW patent love philtre and make herself fall in love with him, unconditionally, for ever. He’d looked at her in amazement and horror, because it wasn’t fair to confront him with a choice like that. As his world spun around him, upside down and out of control, he’d struggled to find some fixed point whereby to make his choice; and of course he’d hit upon What’s the right thing to do? Once he’d made that call, the rest was easy. No, he couldn’t let Sophie drink the philtre, because then her love for him would be a lie, synthetic, involuntary; like plastic flowers or British lager, not real, lifeless, worthless. So he’d done what he knew was the right thing, and both of them had lived wretchedly ever after. Until now, of course.

  There had been a very brief moment, a split second; and Paul had chosen to do what he thought was right. Which was fine, in a way, because at least it was a criterion, albeit a totally random and arbitrary one, like choosing someone to be Prime Minister by the length of their toenails. At the time he’d had no way of knowing that it was also a wretched, stupid mistake, which he could now say with total accuracy he’d regretted for the rest of his life. Annoying, really, since it’d been (he now realised, with the benefit of hindsight, not to mention the added clarity which comes with being effectively dead) the only decision he’d ever faced which really mattered. He’d loved and won and lost and—

  —And screwed up. Regrets, he thought, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention; except for that one colossal and unforgivable exception, that howling, staring, screaming example of taking his eye off the ball when it had really mattered. Which was why it was basically a pretty bad break for him, dying like this with his one great act of stupidity unpurged and now incapable of absolution. I let some trivial shit like right-and-wrong come between me and the girl I actually, genuinely, truly love. That was not good. I wish I hadn’t done that. But now it’s too late to set it right, and accordingly the world will be out of true for ever. While there’d been life, there’d been hope. Now there was just anger, frustration, and the infuriating knowledge that he’d lived, and died, an idiot.