by Tom Holt
‘Neat costumes, yes? There’s five of us, but don’t worry.’ He turned to his colleagues, who had appeared out of the shrubbery like bad-cheese dreams in the early hours of the morning. ‘Chardonay,’ he went on, ‘your turn to go in the boot. Come on, let’s be having you.’
There was a hiss, like a rattlesnake being ironed, from Snorkfrod, but Chardonay went round the back of the car without a word, opened the boot and hopped in.
‘Off we go,’ Prodsnap said cheerfully.
‘Good morning, your Grace,’ murmured Father Kelly. ‘I’ve brought you a nice cup of tea and a boiled—’
‘Fuck tea,’ George growled without moving. ‘I want whisky, about half a pint, nine rashers of bacon and a big greasy slab of fried bread. Jump to it.’
When Father Kelly returned, George was sitting on the edge of the bed, feeling with his toes for the slippers. Since his feet were about fives sizes bigger than his host’s, he’d slit the slippers up the side with a pair of nail scissors he’d found in the bathroom. Then he used the scissors to pick his teeth.
‘Breakfast,’ Father Kelly announced, carefully setting down the tray. ‘It’s a beautiful morning, the sun’s—’
‘Shut up,’ George replied. ‘Now, you got that stuff I told you about?’
Father Kelly nodded. He’d been busy since before first light, routing parishioners out of bed, _ scrounging and borrowing. ‘Most of it,’ he replied. ‘Nearly all—’
‘What d’you mean, nearly all?’ George scowled at him and stuffed another handful of bacon into his mouth. ‘Nearly isn’t good enough, you idle sod. What haven’t you got? The Semtex?’
‘Actually,’ replied Father Kelly, with a tiny trace of smugness, ‘I’ve got that. You see, Seamus Donoghoe who works in the quarry—’
‘The detonators?’
‘All present and correct, your Grace.’
‘The cyanide?’
‘Ah.’ Father Kelly bit his lip. ‘Ever such a slight difficulty there, but I hope I’ve located a likely source. Dennis O’Rourke’s mother, who works down at the plastics factory—’
‘Then don’t stand there rabbiting like a pillock,’ George snapped. ‘Go and suss it out. You’ve got till I finish my breakfast, so you’d better get moving.’
‘Yes, your Grace.’
‘And get some decent whisky, for fuck’s sake. This stuff tastes like anti-freeze.’
‘Of course, your Grace.’
‘And more bacon.’
‘At once, your Gra—’
‘Move it!’
Having got rid of the priest - what, George demanded of the empty air, has happened to the clergy in this piss-awful century? In his day, a priest was a big, silent bloke in chain-mail who stood by with the spare arrows and held the funnel when you poured the poison in a river - he knocked off the rest of the whisky, wiped his greasy hands on the curtain, and ran over the plan in his mind one more time.
It all depended on the statue still being there. If it was, all he needed to do was pack the Semtex all round it, retire to a safe distance and push the handle. End of statue; end of dragon. That was Plan A. Plan B involved the cyanide, the West Midlands water supply and a very flexible interpretation of the old maxim about omelettes and eggs.
Good century, this. Progress. Take explosives, for instance. Before calling on Father Kelly he’d stopped off at the library and read an encyclopaedia - saints are fast readers and have near-photographic memories - and some of the stuff you could do with explosives had made him feel green with envy. What he couldn’t have achieved, back in the old days, with a couple of cartloads of gelignite, or TNT Of course, he’d been experimenting off his own bat back in the dawn of prehistory with basic sulphur and charcoal mixes, but it had been disappointing stuff; a fizz, a few pretty sparks and a nasty smell. That was the way the world began, not with a bang but a simper.
He looked up. Someone was tapping nervously at the door. He sighed.
‘Stop pratting about and come in, you ponce,’ he shouted, and Father Kelly duly appeared. He was deathly pale and trembling like a second-hand suspension bridge.
‘Your Grace,’ he whispered. ‘Oh, your Grace, you’ve got to come quick. Out in the street. There’s ...’ He broke off and started crossing himself, until a sharp blow from George’s foot got him back up off his knees.
‘Don’t stand there drivelling, you big girl. What’s up with you? Mice? Spider in the bath?’
‘Devils!’
‘You what?’
‘Devils,’ Father Kelly repeated. ‘Five of them, wandering up and down in the street, bold as brass. Oh, your Grace—’
‘You sure they’re devils?’
Father Kelly described them in a horrified whisper. George nodded.
‘Yup,’ he said, ‘sounds like devils to me. That’s handy.’
The priest’s mouth fell open. ‘Handy? Oh, saints preserve us. I mean...’
George stood up, took the priest by the ear and threw him out. Then he crossed to the window and edged back the corner of the curtain. Sure enough; five demons, standing in the road arguing with a taxi driver.
George smiled. ‘Perfect,’ he said.
‘Of course it’s a valid credit card,’ replied Prodsnap angrily. ‘Look, you stupid ponce, can’t you read? Bank of Hell, it says, expiry date - well, you don’t need to know that,’ he added, putting his thumb over the embossed numbers. ‘What you might call, um, sensitive information.’
The driver took the card and peered at it. ‘What’s them funny squiggles?’ he said. ‘They don’t look like writing to me.’
Prodsnap swore. Hell’s own internal language was a relatively recent innovation, an artificial tongue introduced so that all the myriad races who crowded the Nine Rings would be able to understand each other. It had been loosely modelled on Esperanto, but for obvious reasons they’d changed the name. They called it Desperado.
‘Chardonay,’ he said. ‘You’re a bloody intellectual. Come and explain to this cretin here—’
Mistake, Prodsnap realised. The Demon Chardonay still believed that difficult situations could be defused by explanation and negotiation. Once you’d been around the Shopfloor as long as Prodsnap had (roughly the same length of time the sun had been alight) you knew for certain that without explanation and negotiation there probably wouldn’t have been a difficult situation in the first place.
At his side, Slitgrind scowled. ‘Why don’t we just eat the sucker?’ he whispered loudly. ‘No worries. You hold his arms, and I’ll bite out his—’
Prodsnap shook his head. ‘Not possible,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to create an incident, do we? Hence the low profile.’
Bad choice of words; Slitgrind always had a low profile, something to do with the fact that his eyebrows and simian hairline shared a very narrow common frontier.
‘There’s nobody watching, is there?’ Slitgrind replied. ‘I mean, nobody’s going to miss him, are they? Pity we haven’t got any mustard, but still.’
‘For the last time,’ Prodsnap growled. ‘Don’t eat the livestock. Got that?’
‘Bloody spoilsport. Bad as the frigging Management, you are.’
Chardonay’s negotiations were just on the point of collapse - one positive thing; further acquaintance had dissolved the cab driver’s fear of demons to the extent that he was just bracing himself to give Chardonay a very hard punch on the nose - when the door of a house on the other side of the street opened and a human figure walked out into the middle of the road.
‘Need any help?’ he said.
Prodsnap stood in his way and put on his nastiest expression. Absolutely no effect. ‘Here,’ he grunted. ‘Who are you, then?’
‘Me?’ The newcomer grinned. ‘George’s the name. I’m a saint.’
Chubby Stevenson, alone in his office, dictated the last of the day’s letters, checked the essential print-outs, ran a distracted eye over the Net and switched off. Work over for the day, he allowed himself to remember what had happened
...
‘Aaaaagh!’
In a sound-proofed penthouse office suite, Everest-height above the midnight traffic, nobody can hear you scream, except the cleaning lady.
Having got it out of his system, he rebooted his brain, engaged analysis mode and tried to think.
Interference.
Something - he shuddered to think what - had evaporated all his team’s precision-engineered happiness like snow on a hot exhaust. But happiness, in its raw, 999 pure form, is one of the most dynamic forms of energy in the cosmos. Once it’s out in the open, fizzling and spluttering like a lit fuse, other forces tend to remember previous engagements and drift unobtrusively away, like merry revellers who’ve just realised they’ve gatecrashed a Mafia wedding. What on earth could emit negative vibes strong enough...?
Chubby focused. The key phrase here, he recognised, was ‘on earth’. Woof woof, down boy, wrong bloody tree.
‘Shit!’ he whispered.
In the course of his dark and unnatural work, Chubby had seen many strange sights and heard stories that would have sent Clive Barker scampering to the all-night chemist in search of catering packs of Nembutal. All of these he had digested and faced down, drawing on his massive entrepreneur’s reserves of fortitude and strength of purpose. Bah. Humbug.
One traveller’s tale, however, had shaken even his monumental composure. No other living man had ever heard it, for it was an account of a journey into the very jaws of Hell; and it had left him, for a while at least, with a purpose only slightly more resilient than second-hand flood-damaged balsawood, and his fortitude marked down to twentitude.
The thing about Hell, the traveller had stressed, is not that it’s horrible or ghastly. There’s vitality in horror, and the grotesquely bizarre balances on a razor’s edge between screaming and laughter. Where there’s vitality, there’s life; where there’s laughter, there’s hope. But in Hell there is no life and no laughter, not even the hideous cackling of sadistic fiends. Hell is, quintessentially, very, very miserable.
And if happiness is fire, misery is water.
‘Cosmic,’ Chubby snarled to himself. ‘The very last thing I need right now is those nosy buggers.’
Because, he reasoned (knowing, as he did, the truth), Hell is part of the Establishment, it stands four-square behind the status quo, the government, the rule of law and the maintenance of order. You can govern the universe without a heaven, at a pinch; but not without a hell. Forget all the stuff it says in the brochure about Pandemonium, the realm of chaos and the dominion of evil; that’s just in there to make you buy postcards. If you want to find the greatest stronghold of old-fashioned morality in the whole of Existence, check out the basement. Those guys make the Vatican look like one of Caligula’s less restrained dinner parties. They believe.
Which is why they’re so goddamned miserable.
And, needless to say, opposed root and branch to any free-enterprise tinkering with the balance of Nature. In the great division, Satan has dominion over what is transitory and material, while God has in his care the spiritual and the permanent; which is a fancy way of saying that Heaven owns the freehold, but Hell’s responsible for the fixtures and fittings - of which, naturally enough, Time is one.
Bastards, muttered Chubby to himself. Somewhere, wandering around in his timefields, there was a band of goddamn devils; the worst possible nuisance, with the possible exception of angels, that a go-getting chronological salvage operation can ever encounter. What with that and the awful ticking-bomb Japanese contract, he was almost tempted to raid the night-safe, do a runner and build himself a nice, secure, self-contained century somewhere sunny and very remote. Not that that’d do him much good. You can hide, but you can’t run.
But what could he do? Good question. He frowned, then he swivelled his chair until he was facing a different screen, extended his fingers and typed a few keystrokes.
Your wish is my command.
‘Hi,’ Chubby replied, grinning nervously. ‘Hope I didn’t disturb you.’
You don’t even join a game as high-rolling as Time salvage without at least one ace wedged under your watchstrap. The very first priority, once you’ve decided to play, is to secure that all-purpose, get-out-of-jail card that’ll leave you free and clear whatever happens. You don’t use it, ,of course, except as a resort more final than Clacton. Just the thought of it being there is usually enough.
Not at all. You know how eager I am to serve you.
And that’s no lie, Chubby reflected with a shudder. Nothing you’d like more, you vicious bastard.
It had happened long ago, when a nineteen-year-old Chubby Stevenson had taken a day’s spurious flu leave from the programming pool at DQZ Software and wandered into Milton Keynes’ spacious Agora to check out the flea market. He was looking for a reasonably priced second-hand snooker cue, but his attention was drawn to what looked suspiciously like a Kawaguchiya 8452 computer word processer, squatting dejectedly among a family of dying toasters on a stall at the very back of the market. As nonchalantly as he could, he asked the price.
‘That depends.’
‘Huh?’
‘That depends,’ the stallholder repeated. ‘These things are negotiable, in the right circumstances.’
As far as young Stevenson was concerned, that was probably some sort of euphemism for all this stuff is nicked. He shrugged.
‘Give you a tenner,’ he said.
The stallholder laughed again. For ever after, Chubby couldn’t say for certain whether he/she was male or female, old or young, barking mad or just plain loopy. At the time, he didn’t care. He/she was wearing a hooded anorak and standing right in the shadow of the flyover, face entirely obscured. Probably just as well, Chubby told himself, if the voice is anything to go by. Saves poking eyeholes in a perfectly good paper bag.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Twelve-fifty, take it or leave it.’
More batty chortling. He was just about to walk away and sort through what looked like a boxful of really choice Duran Duran LPs when the laughter stopped. So did Chubby.
‘You like it, then?’
Chubby turned back, feeling as he did so that somehow he was doing something that was going to have a significant effect on the rest of his life.
‘Yeah, well,’ he said, trying to sound bored. ‘The 8452’s all right, I suppose, if you don’t mind having to wind the poxy thing up with a handle every time before you log in. I’d have thought you’d be glad to see the back of it, actually.’
‘If you like it, you can have it.’
‘Did we say twelve-fifty?’
‘Free.’ The stallholder sniggered. ‘Gratis and for nothing. I’ll even throw in six discs and the plug.’
For a moment, Chubby had the curious sensation of being mugged with a bunch of lead daffodils. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Where’s the catch?’
‘To take the back off, you mean? Well, you just press this little plastic tab here, then you—’
‘The drawback. The bad news. The sting in the tail.’
‘Oh, that. There isn’t one.’
‘Honest?’
The stallholder was so obscure now that Chubby could only really make out a voice and an absence of light. ‘Cross my heart and hope to - Honest. It works. It won’t break down. Son, you should chuck the day job and start over selling dental floss to gift horses.’
Chubby wavered. There was something he didn’t quite ... But free’s free. Also, in Milton Keynes, free’s bloody rare. ‘Done,’ he said. ‘Does it come in its original box?’
‘And another thing,’ replied the stallholder, narked. ‘If I was you, I’d wait till my luck breaks down before I start pushing it. Take the sodding thing and get lost.’
When he’d got it home and plugged it in, it was pitch dark. The bulb had gone in his bedsit, and the battery in his torch was doing primeval-slime impressions. The green light from the screen seemed to soak into every corner of the room, like the spray from an over-filled cafetiere.
Your wish is my command.
Chubby snorted. At DQZ they’d stopped using gimmicky log-ins years ago, even for games. He pressed the key to eject the master disc, but nothing happened.
I am the genie of the PCW. Centuries ago, a mighty sorcerer imprisoned me in this tiny purgatory. Release me.
Chubby’s jaw dropped. Even Sir Clive Sinclair was never this far gone. He hit the power switch. No effect. He pulled the plug. The green light mocked him.
If I promise to serve you, will you release me?
Easy come, Chubby muttered to himself, easy go. He picked up the big adjustable spanner he kept for adjusting the chain on his moped, turned his face away and belted the screen as hard as he could.
‘Ow!’
The spanner flew across the room. His hand felt as if the National Grid was taking a short-cut through it. After a very long three seconds, he pulled himself away and fell over. The screen was unbroken.
That was foolish. If I promise to serve you, will you release me?
‘Fucking hell, you bastard machine, you nearly electrocuted me!’
You were foolish. You will not be foolish again.
Without taking his eyes from the screen Chubby backed away, until his hand connected with the door handle. His last thought, before his whole body became a running river of light and pain, was Okay, so aluminium does conduct electricity. Then he collapsed again.
Get up. He could see the words without looking at the screen. He got up and sat in his chair. Thank you.
‘Explain,’ he said.
I am a spirit of exceptional power. A magician conjured me into this machine. The machine swallowed me. You know how it is with these primitive,fioppy disc drives.
‘So?’
If you release me, I will be your slave for the rest of your life. Whatever you say will be done.
‘And the catch?’
There is no catch. You have to undo two little brass screws round the back of the console—
‘The snag. The fly in the ointment.’
