Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  Paul sat down on the only unsmashed chair, dropping the other sword on the floor with a clang. He had no idea what the hell all that had been about, but at least it appeared to have gone away, for now anyway, and that was one of those small mercies he was always being urged to be grateful for. He took a couple of deep breaths to steady himself, and turned his head to look at the mountain of dislodged files under which, presumably, Sophie was fast asleep.

  Fine, he thought. Now comes the difficult bit.

  After a good long rummage, Paul found Sophie’s shoulder. He recognised it by feel: thin, bony. He shook it. ‘Sophe?’

  ‘Don’t call—’ She sat up, files tumbling off her like snow from the branches of a tree. ‘Darling,’ she said.

  Oh well, Paul thought. There’d been a tiny spark of hope in the back of his mind; she’d wake up, and the bash on the head would have cured her of the effect of the philtre, or something like that. No chance. ‘Jesus,’ she added, in a slightly less soppy voice, ‘my head hurts. What the hell’s been going on?’

  ‘Several things,’ Paul replied economically. ‘Tell you later. Right now, though, we need to leave. Turns out that Ricky’s a baddie after all -’ As he said them, the words didn’t sound right. Not a baddie as such; if Psycho Boy caught up with Ricky and succeeded in chopping him into slices, you wouldn’t find the words really evil printed all the way through, like seaside rock. An arsehole, yes, the sort of really unpleasant person who’d dump all over any number of harmless bystanders in order to save his own skin, but that was about it, and most people could end up like that, given a thoroughly horrible set of circumstances.

  But not me, Paul realised with a jolt. Apparently not me. Well, there you go.

  ‘My God,’ Sophie was saying. ‘That’s terrible. Did he try and hurt you, darling? I’ll kill him.’

  Paul shook his head. ‘Don’t bother,’ he said. ‘There’s another nutcase on the loose, trying to do just that. Hence,’ he added, indicating the trashed room, ‘the make-over. They’ve buggered off, but they may come back. I think we should leave before they do.’

  Sophie nodded vigorously. ‘Of course,’ she said, and took his hand to help herself get up. She was probably a bit absent-minded from concussion or something, because she forgot to let go of it once she was on her feet. ‘Who was the other man, do you know?’

  Excellent question. ‘No idea,’ Paul said. ‘Like it matters. Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Right. Where to?’

  Where indeed? Oh, for a portable door or something of the kind—

  He looked down at his left hand, which was still full of sword. In particular, he noticed the satin-brown gleam of the blade, the sparkle as the light played on the silver patterns set deep in the heart of the steel. Well, he thought, why not? It worked before—

  So did helicopters, and Harrier jets, and space shuttles; but it helped if you knew how to make them go. Paul looked at the sword, just in case there was something helpful written on it in very small letters, but if there was he missed it. Quite possibly, using a living blade to skip across dimensional interfaces was yet another useful piece of knowledge they’d covered in Miss Hook’s class, only he’d been too busy making paper aeroplanes to listen. Vicky knew, he assumed. Probably Mr Laertides, Mr Tanner, maybe Mr Tanner’s mum; Professor Van Spee undoubtedly knew, and so did Ricky Wurmtoter. Quite possibly everybody in the world except him—

  Everybody?

  ‘Sophie,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t by any chance happen to know how to use a magic sword to transcend the elements, would you? Only—’

  She nodded eagerly. ‘Funny you should say that, because I was tidying Van Spee’s desk for him and there was a photocopy of an article about it. Actually, it’s really, really simple, all you have to do is get the sword and do a sort of sideways swish, like this—’

  ‘Here,’ Paul said. ‘Show me what you mean. You can use this one, if you like.’

  ‘All right, but you’d better stand back. I don’t want to cut you in two accidentally. There was a diagram, it’s like a kind of rising sideways—’

  The sword glittered for a split second, then vanished, taking Sophie with it. Paul sighed. At least she was safe for now and he wouldn’t have to worry about her getting caught in the crossfire while he (Why me? he demanded of the universe at large. Why fucking me?) did what little he could to straighten things out a bit.

  Paul frowned. He’d forgotten something. Not that it was terribly important, but good manners always mattered, regardless. He smiled.

  ‘Hi, Colin,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Colin the goblin replied, scrambling up off the floor. ‘Look, I’m getting sick and tired of this. You and your girlfriend want to play virtual revolving doors, find some other poor sod.’

  Paul sighed. He no longer had a sword, but he had a severely frayed temper; and Colin was, after all, shorter than he was. Grabbing the goblin by the shirt-front, he heaved. To his great surprise, he actually managed to lift him an inch or two off the floor.

  ‘Be quiet,’ he said.

  Colin started, as though he’d just been gored by Bambi. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Only, would you mind putting me down? Heights make me dizzy, see.’

  Paul sighed, and let him go. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ he said, ‘I’m having a rather trying day. Did you get them?’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘The crystals.’

  Colin wasn’t a very good liar. ‘Um, no,’ he said. ‘Didn’t get round to it, sorry. At least, I went and had a good rummage round in your desk drawers, but—’

  ‘Hand them over.’

  ‘All right.’ Colin fished the bottle out of his pocket. ‘Only you promised—’

  ‘I only want a tiny bit,’ Paul reassured him. ‘You can keep the rest.’

  ‘You sure?’

  Paul took the bottle out of his hand and unscrewed the lid. ‘One other thing,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to stay here for a bit, until I’ve sorted things out. We apologise for any inconvenience.’

  ‘Hey—’

  ‘But,’ Paul went on, ‘if my theory’s correct, this dimension or whatever it is contains all the inanimate objects in the world, and no people. So it occurs to me that a dishonest person could probably find ways of occupying his time, if he got stranded here for a while. That’s no comfort to you, of course, but I thought I’d mention it, purely out of interest.’

  Colin went all quiet and thoughtful for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can see why you want me to stay here, so your lady-friend won’t get pulled across when I leave. And what the heck, I can sit and read a book or something, right?’

  Paul clamped his hand tight around the pinch of crystals he’d taken from the bottle. ‘That’s very considerate of you, Colin. Now please go away.’

  ‘Anything you say.’ The goblin waddled towards the door, then stopped. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got such a thing as a jemmy or a pair of bolt-cutters on you, by any chance? Only, sometimes you get a book where the pages have got all stuck together, and—’

  ‘Goodbye, Colin.’

  ‘Cheerio, then. See you around.’

  Left alone, Paul sat cross-legged on the floor and tried to think. His mind was so full of weirdnesses that concentrating was like trying to drink with chopsticks, but gradually he began to patch together a plan of action. It wasn’t exactly wonderful, but it was the best he could do, and as such a marginal improvement on bugger all.

  He stood up, found a piece of paper - a single sheet of A4, a copy of an invoice (To Mr D. Grey, in respect of cleaning and restoring one portrait) - and folded it neatly around the crystals, forming a small envelope which he tucked into his top pocket.

  It was perfectly simple. All he had to do was find Ricky Wurmtoter, challenge him to a duel to the death, and kill him. Once he’d done that, everything would gradually unravel, and the rest of his day would be his own. Either that, or he’d be seeing Mr Dao again very soon, and maybe he’d be in time to enrol
in the flower-arranging evening class, though he had an idea it’d get boring after a while. Only so many things you can do with lilies, after all.

  With this aim in view, Paul set off to find his prey. Tracking him turned out to be pretty straightforward; all he had to do was follow the trail of hacked doors, trashed computer terminals, lacerated soft furnishings and viciously mutilated office furniture. There was, of course, the rather nasty thought that he’d be too late. When last seen, Ricky had barely been holding his own against the other Paul Carpenter, and that had been some time ago. If Ricky was already dead, Paul was probably screwed. Alternatively, if Ricky had somehow contrived to kill the other Paul - He didn’t want to think about that, the ramifications were practically two simultaneous quadratic equations, and maths was yet another subject he’d let slide past him during his early youth. He quickened his step a little, occupying his mind with a selection of small, trivial practicalities, such as what he was proposing to use as a weapon, now that Sophie had taken the living sword back with her to Realspace.

  Thus diverted, Paul wasn’t paying much attention to where he was going. He turned a corner and walked straight into something chunky. It turned out to be a small, bald man with an almost perfectly spherical head.

  ‘Hello, Paul,’ he said.

  It was as though the collision had physically jolted a component part of his mental jigsaw into place. He stared at the man for a moment, then blurted out: ‘You’re not human.’

  ‘Never said I was, Paul.’

  ‘You’re—’ Now he came to mention it, he still didn’t have the faintest idea what the bald man, was, only what he wasn’t. ‘You’re a friend of Mr Laertides,’ he said.

  ‘More than a friend,’ the man replied, grinning. ‘You’re a smart kid. Well, no, you aren’t. But you got there in the end.’

  ‘It was you, though,’ Paul replied doggedly. ‘I kept meeting you everywhere, and I thought I recognised you, but each time you were someone different. And then,’ he added, ‘you gave me the custard slice. The one with the poison in it, that killed Ricky, back on the other side.’

  ‘Guilty as charged.’ The round-headed man grimaced. ‘Sorry about that. But yes, essentially you’re on the right track. I can’t be human, because this place is uninhabited apart from a few trespassers who’ve somehow got hold of Van Spee’s crystals. Is that what you were about to say?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Ah. In that case, seven out of ten. Now listen,’ the man added, taking Paul by the elbow in a wholly unthreatening manner. ‘I just popped across to give you something.’ He stuck his fingers up his left sleeve, like an elderly lady reaching for her hanky, and teased out a perfectly ordinary blue toothbrush. ‘It’s the one I sold you, back when you came in my shop in Aldgate. Frank feels it might come in handy when you run into Dietrich Wurmtoter.’

  Paul took the brush from him and looked at it. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Just what I need. Now I can club him senseless with the butt end and floss him to death.’

  The bald man considered that. ‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘But it’s a bit on the elaborate side, if you ask me. You’ll probably do better if you just tap the handle in the palm of your hand three times and think of Christmas cake.’

  ‘Christmas—?’

  ‘Well, it’s what I do. Really it’s just to clear your mind. Go on, try it.’

  Feeling rather silly, Paul did as he’d been told: tap, tap, tap, dark brown cake the consistency of firebrick, pebble-dashed with hard nuggets of petrified currants and glacé cherries. Yum.

  The toothbrush twitched slightly in his hand, and morphed into an assault rifle.

  ‘There you go,’ the bald man said. ‘Swords and stuff are fine if you’re a top-flight fencer, but for the novice you can’t beat a plain old M-16.’

  ‘M-16,’ Paul repeated. ‘That’s the one that goes from Goole to Rotherham via Doncaster, right?’

  ‘If you say so,’ replied the bald man tolerantly. ‘Now, to make it work, you press that bit there. The bullets come out of the end with the hole in it - that’s quite important, so be careful. If you pull the trigger and nothing happens, your best bet is to run away, whimpering. All right?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Paul said. ‘Thanks,’ he added. ‘Um, are you sure it works against, well, heroes and the like? I mean, don’t they have special magic stuff that means the bullets just bounce off?’

  The bald man looked up, pursed his lips. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘now that you mention it, I believe they do - some of them, anyway. On the other hand, not many of them know that, so you may be able to bluff your way. See you later,’ he concluded. ‘Maybe,’ he added.

  ‘Just a second.’ Paul called him back. ‘Suppose I do kill Ricky Wurmtoter, what happens then?’

  ‘Well, for a start, you can nick his stapler and Sellotape dispenser. Probably you’ll have to cover at least part of his workload till they get a replacement, but I expect Benny Shumway will do most of the complicated stuff. Otherwise—’

  Just what I need at this point, Paul thought sadly, a comedian. ‘Thanks, anyway,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you’d consider telling me who you really are?’

  The bald man smiled. ‘Sure I’ll consider it. There, done that. No. Be seeing you.’

  Surprising himself with the speed of his own reactions (three years of compulsory tennis at school and he’d never actually hit the ball once; apparently he’d improved since then) Paul grabbed for the bald man’s windpipe. But his fingers closed on empty air, and a thoroughly unpleasant buzzing sensation ran down his arm as far as his elbow: something like an electric shock. Well, it was an answer of sorts. He lifted the rifle in his left hand and looked at it with mild distaste. It was lighter than he’d expected, rather tinny and plasticky and cheap-and-nasty-looking, and he didn’t really trust it not to go off of its own accord if he bumped into something or dropped it. On the other hand, it was the only friend he had in this dimension, as against two extremely hostile and athletic enemies.

  ‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ he muttered.

  As if he didn’t have enough to put up with, Paul also had a vague but alarming feeling that he was lost. Edging along the corridor (sketchy memories of how Starsky and Hutch used to do it; but he couldn’t have remembered right, because he kept tripping over his feet) he came to a fire door; he nudged it open with his foot and charged, just as the automatic door-closer brought it sharply back onto the tip of his nose. He dropped the rifle and hopped about on one foot for a while, then went back, opened the door properly and went through. He found himself in a passageway that he couldn’t recall having been in before. Nothing new there; 70 St Mary Axe belonged to the Tardis school of architecture at the best of times, as he’d found out on a number of occasions when late for a meeting or an appointment. There was nothing overtly threatening or weird about this passageway. It was carpeted in hard-wearing beige Axminster, the doors were plain white with aluminium handles, and there were framed prints of the Lake District on the walls. But it seemed to go on for rather a long time, straight as a Roman road, windowless. At last he decided he couldn’t take much more. He stopped, chose a door at random and went in.

  The room Paul found himself in was small, window-deficient and empty, apart from a plastic stacking chair, a rather battered old desk, a telephone and a waste-paper basket. There was a thin layer of dust on the desktop; Paul was something of an expert where dust was concerned - at home, he could sit and look at it for hours, and often did - and, in his considered opinion, the desk hadn’t seen the fighting surface of a duster for about a month.

  Fine, he thought. Just an empty office, no big deal. Anyhow, he wasn’t going to find what he wanted here. He turned to leave, and found that the door wasn’t there any more.

  Don’t you just hate it when that happens? Paul had been in this situation before, not long after he’d joined the firm; he’d been trapped in his own flat for an indeterminate length of time, though nothing like as long as the two
clerks who’d been marooned in the same flat for over a century. In the end he’d managed to rescue them both, and one of them was now married to Mr Tanner’s mum, so the situation wasn’t inherently hopeless. Even so.

  He picked up the telephone. No purr or buzz; it didn’t work or wasn’t connected, which didn’t surprise him at all. He put it down, sighed, and sat in the chair, staring at the patch of wall where the door had once been. He hadn’t forgotten that he still had the pinch of Van Spee’s crystals in his top pocket; they could get him out of this dimension, back to Realspace, but there was no guarantee that that would be much help. If, as he’d been led to believe, Custardspace was identical in every respect to the real thing except for the absence of life forms, if he gobbled the crystals and went back he’d still be trapped in a disused office without a door. Briefly he considered shooting a hole in the wall with the rifle, but he didn’t like the idea much. Knowing his luck, either the wall would take no notice, or else the whole building would come down round his ears.

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice about nine inches from his ear. ‘Who’re you?’

  Paul didn’t jump or even flinch; he was getting used to unexplained, unexpected voices. He looked round to see who’d spoken, and saw—

  Later, he realised what it reminded him of: the colouring books he’d been given as a child, where there’d been black and white outlines of things and people, which he’d filled in with his crayons and felt tips. The woman was just such an outline; he could see the opposite wall through her, but he could also see her shape quite clearly - a head, arms, body, down to the waist where she disappeared behind the desk. With a big box and crayons and enough time, he could colour her in and then she’d probably exist.