Expecting Someone Taller

by Tom Holt

  Just then, two enormous ravens flapped slowly and lazily over Malcolm’s head. He stood paralysed with inexplicable fear, but the ravens flew on. The voices died away, the wind dropped, the rain subsided. As soon as he was able to move, Malcolm jumped in his car and drove home as fast as the antiquated and ill-maintained engine would permit him to go. He undressed in the dark and fell into bed, and was soon fast asleep and dreaming a strange and terrible dream, all about being trapped in a crowded lift with no trousers on. Suddenly he woke up and sat bolt upright in the darkness. On his finger was the Ring. Beside his bed, between his watch and his key-chain, was the Tarnhelm. Outside his window, a nightingale was telling another nightingale what it had had for lunch.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Malcolm, and went back to sleep.

  The Oberkasseler Bridge over the Rhine has acquired a sinister reputation in recent years, and the two policemen who were patrolling it knew this only too well. They knew what to look for, and they seldom had to look far in this particular area.

  A tall man with long grey hair falling untidily over the collar of his dark blue suit leaned against the parapet eating an ice cream. Although impeccably dressed, he was palpably all wrong, and the two policemen looked at each other with pleasant anticipation.

  ‘Drugs?’ suggested the first policeman.

  ‘More like dirty books,’ said the other. ‘If he’s armed, it’s my turn.’

  ‘It’s always your turn,’ grumbled his companion.

  The first policeman shrugged his shoulders. ‘Oh, all right then,’ he said. ‘But I get to drive back to the station.’

  But as they approached their prey, they began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. It was not fear but a sort of awe or respect that caused them to hesitate as the tall man turned and stared at them calmly through his one eye. Suddenly, they found that they were having difficulty breathing.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the first policeman, gasping slightly, ‘can you tell me the time?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said the tall man, without looking at his watch, ‘it’s just after half-past eleven.’

  The two policemen turned and walked away quickly. As they did so, they both simultaneously looked at their own watches. Twenty-eight minutes to twelve.

  ‘He must have been looking at the clock,’ said the first policeman.

  ‘What clock?’ inquired his companion, puzzled.

  ‘I don’t know. Any bloody clock.’

  The tall man turned and gazed down at the brown river for a while. Then he clicked his fingers, and a pair of enormous ravens floated down and landed on either side of him on the parapet. The tall man broke little pieces off the rim of his cornet and flicked them at the two birds as he questioned them.

  ‘Any luck?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you think?’ replied the smaller of the two.

  ‘Keep trying,’ said the tall man calmly. ‘Have you done America today?’

  The smaller raven’s beak was full of cornet, so the larger raven, although unused to being the spokesman, said Yes, they had. No luck.

  ‘We checked America,’ said the smaller raven, ‘and Africa, and Asia, and Australasia, and Europe. Bugger all, same as always.’

  ‘Maybe you were looking in the wrong place,’ suggested the tall man.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said the smaller raven. ‘It’s like looking for . . .’ the bird racked its brains for a suitably graphic simile ‘. . . for a needle in a haystack,’ it concluded triumphantly.

  ‘Well,’ said the tall man, ‘I suggest you go and look again. Carefully, this time. My patience is beginning to wear a little thin.’

  Suddenly he closed his broad fist around the cornet, crushing it into flakes and dust.

  ‘You’ve got ice cream all over your hand,’ observed the larger raven.

  ‘So I have,’ said the tall man. ‘Now get out, and this time concentrate.’

  The ravens flapped their broad, drab wings and floated away. Frowning, the tall man clicked the fingers of his clean hand and took out his handkerchief.

  ‘I’ve got a tissue if you’d rather use it,’ said a nervous-looking thin man who had hurried up to him. The tall man waved it away.

  ‘How about you?’ he asked the thin man. ‘Done any good?’

  ‘Nothing. I did Toronto, Lusaka, and Brasilia. Have you ever been to Brasilia? Last place God made. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘The more I think about it,’ said the tall man, ignoring this gaffe, ‘the more convinced I am that he’s still in Europe. When Ingolf went to ground, the other continents hadn’t even been discovered.’

  The thin man looked puzzled. ‘Ingolf?’ he said. ‘Haven’t you heard?’

  The tall man turned his head and fixed him with his one eye. The thin man started to tremble slightly, for he knew that expression well.

  ‘Ingolf is dead,’ continued the thin man. ‘I thought you’d have known.’

  The tall man was silent. Clouds, which had not been there a moment before, passed in front of the sun.

  ‘I’m only the King of the Gods, nobody ever bothers to tell me anything,’ said the tall man. ‘So?’

  ‘He died at a quarter to midnight last night, at a place called Ralegh’s Cross in the West of England. He was knocked down by a car, and . . .’

  Rain was falling now, hard and straight, but the thin man was sweating. Oddly enough, the tall man wasn’t getting wet.

  ‘No sign of the Ring,’ said the thin man nervously. ‘Or the helmet. I’ve checked all the usual suspects, but they don’t seem to have heard or seen anything. In fact, they were as surprised as you were. I mean . . .’

  Thunder now, and a flicker of distant lightning.

  ‘I got there as quickly as I could,’ said the thin man, desperately. ‘As soon as I felt the shock. But I was in Brasilia, like I said, and it takes time . . .’

  ‘All the usual suspects?’

  ‘All of them. Every one.’

  Suddenly, the tall man smiled. The rain stopped, and a rainbow flashed across the sky.

  ‘I believe you,’ said the tall man, ‘thousands wouldn’t. Right, so if it wasn’t one of the usual suspects, it must have been an outsider, someone we haven’t dealt with before. That should make it all much easier. So start searching.’

  ‘Anywhere in particular?’

  ‘Use your bloody imagination,’ growled the tall man, irritably, and the rainbow promptly faded away. The thin man smiled feebly, and soon was lost to sight among the passers-by. Wotan, the great Sky-God and King of all the Gods, put his handkerchief back in his pocket and gazed up into the sky, where the two enormous ravens were circling.

  ‘Got all that?’ Wotan murmured.

  Thought, the elder and smaller of the two messenger ravens who are the God’s eyes and ears on earth, dipped his wings to show that he had, and Wotan walked slowly away.

  ‘Like looking for a needle in a haystack,’ repeated Thought, sliding into a convenient thermal. His younger brother, Memory, banked steeply and followed him.

  ‘This is true,’ replied Memory, ‘definitely.’

  ‘You know the real trouble with this business?’ said Memory, diving steeply after a large moth.

  ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘Bloody awful industrial relations, that’s what. I mean, take Wotan. Thinks he’s God almighty.’

  ‘He is, isn’t he?’

  Memory hovered for a moment on a gust of air. ‘I never thought of that,’ he said at last.

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t,’ said Thought, ‘would you?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  The next morning, Malcolm thought long and hard before waking up, for he had come to recognise over the past quarter of a century that rather less can go wrong if you are asleep.

  But the radiant light of a brilliant summer morning, shining in through the window in front of which he had neglected to draw the curtains, chased away all possibility of sleep, and Malcolm was left very much awake, although still rather
confused. Such confusion was, however, his normal state of mind. Without it, he would feel rather lost.

  Confusion is the only possible result of a lifetime of being asked unanswerable questions by one’s parents and relatives, such as ‘What are we going to do with you?’ or ‘Why can’t you be more like your sister?’ To judge by the frequency with which he encountered it, the latter problem was the truly significant one, to which not even the tremendous intellectual resources of his family had been able to find an answer. Malcolm himself had never made any sort of attempt to solve this problem; that was not his role in life. His role (if he had one, which he sometimes doubted) was to provide a comparison with his elder sister Bridget. Rather like the control group in the testing process for a new medicine, Malcolm was there to ensure that his parents never took their exceptional daughter for granted. If ever they were misguided enough to doubt or underestimate that glorious creature, one look at Malcolm was enough to remind them how lucky they were, so it was Malcolm’s calling to be a disappointment; he would be failing in his duty as a son and a brother if he was anything else.

  When Bridget had married Timothy (a man who perfectly exemplified the old saying that all work and no play makes Jack a management consultant) and gone to turn the rays of her effulgence on Sydney, Australia, it was therefore natural that her parents, lured by the prospect of grandchildren to persecute, should sell all they had and follow her. They had muttered something about Malcolm presumably coming too, but their heart was not really in it; he was no longer needed, now that the lacklustre Timothy could take over the mantle of unworthiness. So Malcolm had decided that he would prefer to stay in England. He disliked bright sunlight, had no great interest in the cinema, opera, tennis or seafood, and didn’t particularly want to go on getting under people’s feet for the rest of his life. He was thus able to add ingratitude and lack of proper filial and brotherly affection to the already impressive list of things that were wrong with him but not with his sister.

  After a great deal of enjoyable agonising, Mr and Mrs Fisher decided that Malcolm’s only chance of ever amounting to anything was being made to stand on his own two feet, and allowed him to stay behind. Before they left, however, they went to an extraordinary amount of trouble and effort to find him a boring job and a perfectly horrible flat in a nasty village in the middle of nowhere. So it was that Malcolm had come to leave his native Derby, a place he had never greatly cared for, and go into the West, almost (but not quite) like King Arthur. Taking with him his good suit, his respectable shirts, his spongebag and his two A-levels, he had made his way to Somerset, where he had been greeted with a degree of enthusiasm usually reserved for the first drop of rain at a Wimbledon final by his parents’ long-suffering contacts, whose tireless efforts had made his new life possible. Malcolm took to the trade of an auctioneer’s clerk like a duck to petrol, found the local dialect almost as inscrutable as the locals found his own slight accent, and settled down, like Kent in King Lear, to shape his old course in a country new.

  The fact that he hated and feared his new environment was largely beside the point, for he had been taught long ago that what he thought and felt about any given subject was without question the least important thing in the world. Indeed he had taken this lesson so much to heart that when the Government sent him little pieces of card apparently entitling him to vote in elections, he felt sure that they had intended them for somebody else. He told himself that he would soon get used to it, just as he had always been told that he would grow into the grotesquely outsized garments he was issued with as a child. Although two years had now passed since his arrival in the West Country, the sleeves of his new life, so to speak, still reached down to his fingernails. But that was presumably his fault for not growing. Needless to say, it was a remark of his sister Bridget’s that best summed up his situation; to be precise, a joke she used to make at the age of seven. ‘What is the difference,’ she would ask, ‘between Marmalade [the family cat] and Malcolm?’ When no satisfactory answer could be provided by the admiring adults assembled to hear the joke, Bridget would smile and say, ‘Daddy isn’t allowed to shout at Marmalade.’

  So it seemed rather strange (or counter-intuitive, as his sister would say) that Malcolm should have been chosen by the badger to be the new master of the world. Bridget, yes; she was very good indeed at organising things, and would doubtless make sure that the trains ran on time. But Malcolm - ‘only Malcolm’, as he was affectionately known to his family - that was a mistake, surely. Still, he reflected as he put the Ring back on his finger, since he was surely imagining the whole thing, what did it matter?

  Without bothering to get out of bed, he breathed on the Ring and rubbed it on his forehead. At once, countless gold objects materialised in the air and fell heavily all around him, taking him so completely by surprise that all he could think was that this must be what the Americans mean by a shower. Gold cups, gold plates, gold chalices, torques, ashtrays, pipe-racks, cufflinks, bath-taps, and a few shapeless, unformed articles (presumably made by apprentice Nibelungs at evening classes under the general heading of paperweights) tumbled down on all sides, so that Malcolm had to snatch up a broad embossed dish and hold it over his head until the cascade had subsided in order to avoid serious injury.

  Gathering the shreds of his incredulity around him, Malcolm tried to tell himself that it probably wasn’t real or solid gold; but that was a hard hypothesis. Only a complete and utter cheapskate would go to the trouble of materialising copper or brass by supernatural means. No, it was real, it was solid, it existed, and it was making the place look like a scrapyard, as his mother would undoubtedly say were she present. Having wriggled out from under the hoard, Malcolm found some cardboard boxes and put it all neatly away. That alone was hard work. Malcolm shook his head, yawned, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, thus accidentally starting off the whole process all over again . . .

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ he shouted, as a solid gold ewer missed him by inches, ‘will you stop that?’

  The torrent ceased, and Malcolm sat down on the bed.

  ‘Well, I’m damned,’ he said aloud, as he removed a gold tie-pin that had fallen into his pyjama pocket. ‘Ruler of the world . . .’

  Try as he might, he couldn’t get the concept to make sense, so he put it aside. There was also the Tarnhelm to consider. Very, very tentatively, he put it on and stood in front of the mirror. It covered his head - it seemed to have grown in the night, or did it expand and contract automatically to fit its owner? - and was fastened under the chin by a little buckle in the shape of a crouching gnome.

  So far as he could remember, all he had to do was think of something he wanted to be, or a place he wanted to go to, and the magic cap did all the rest. As usual when asked to think of something, Malcolm’s mind went completely blank. He stood for a while, perplexed, then recalled that the helmet could also make him invisible. He thought invisible. He was.

  It was a strange sensation to look in the mirror and not see oneself, and Malcolm was not sure that he liked it. So he decided to reappear and was profoundly relieved when he saw his reflection in the glass once more. He repeated the process a couple of times, appearing and disappearing like a trafficator, now you see me, now you don’t, and so on. Childish, he said to himself. We must take this thing seriously or else go stark staring mad.

  Next, he must try shape-changing proper. He looked round the room for inspiration, and his eye fell on an old newspaper with a photograph of the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the front page. The thought crossed his mind that his mother had always wanted him to make something of himself, and now if he wanted to, he could be a member of the Cabinet . . .

  In the mirror, he caught sight of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, looking perhaps a trifle eccentric in blue pyjamas and a chain-mail cap, but nevertheless unmistakable. Even though he had done his best to prepare his mind for the experience of shape-changing, the shock was terrifying in its intensity. He looked fra
ntically round the room to see if he could see himself anywhere, but no sign. He had actually changed shape.

  He forced himself to look at the reflection in the mirror, and it occurred to him that if he was going to do this sort of thing at all, he might as well do it properly. He concentrated his mind and thought of the Chancellor in his customary dark grey suit. At once, the reflection changed, and now the only jarring note was the chain-mail cap. That might well be a problem if it insisted on remaining visible all the time. He could wear a hat over it, he supposed, but that would be tricky indoors, and so few people wore hats these days. Malcolm thought how nice it would be if the cap could make itself invisible. At once, it disappeared, giving an excellent view of the Chancellor’s thinning grey hair. So the thing worked. Nevertheless, he reflected, it would be necessary to think with unaccustomed precision when using it.

  Once he had overcome his initial fear of the Tarnhelm, Malcolm set about testing it thoroughly. Had anyone been sufficiently inquisitive, or sufficiently interested in Malcolm Fisher, to be spying on him with a pair of binoculars, they would have seen him change himself into the entire Cabinet, the King of Swaziland, Theseus, and Winston Churchill, all in under a minute. But it then occurred to him that he need not restrict himself to specific people. The only piece of equipment with similar potential he had ever encountered was a word-processor, and there was not even a manual he could consult. How would it be if the Tarnhelm could do Types?

  ‘Make me,’ he said aloud, ‘as handsome as it is possible to be.’

  He closed his eyes, not daring to look, then opened his right eye slowly. Then his left eye, rather more quickly. The result was pleasing, to say the least. For some reason best known to itself, the Tarnhelm had chosen to clothe this paradigm in some barbaric costume from an earlier era - probably to show the magnificent chest and shoulders off to their best advantage. But England is a cold place, even in what is supposed to be summer . . . ‘Try that in a cream suit,’ he suggested, ‘and rather shorter hair. And lose the beard.’