He was, she thought, interesting, entertaining in an eccentric kind of way, but also hideously unattractive to her.
Dirk felt very awkward. “I think there has been some appalling misunderstanding,” he said. “Allow me to explain that—”
He was interrupted by the sudden arrival in their midst of the mechanic from the garage with news of Kate’s car.
“Fixed it,” he said. “In fact there were nothing to fix other than the bumper. Nothing new, that is. The funny noises you mentioned were just the engine. But it’ll go all right. You just have to rev her up, let in the clutch, and then wait for a little bit longer than you might normally expect.”
Kate thanked him a little stiffly for this advice and then insisted on allowing Dirk to pay the twenty-five pounds he was charging for it.
Outside, in the car park, Dirk repeated his urgent request that Kate should go with him, but she was adamant that all she needed was a good night’s sleep and that everything would look bright and clear and easily capable of being coped with in the morning.
Dirk insisted that they should at least exchange phone numbers. Kate agreed to this on condition that Dirk found another route back to London and didn’t sit on her tail.
“Be very careful,” Dirk called to her as her car grumbled out onto the road.
“I will,” shouted Kate, “and if anything impossible happens, I promise you’ll be the first to know.”
For a brief moment, the yellow undulations of the car gleamed dully in the light leaking from the pub windows and stood out against the heavily hunched grayness of the night sky, which soon swallowed it up.
Dirk tried to follow her, but his car wouldn’t start.
15
THE CLOUDS SANK more heavily over the land, clenching into huge sullen towers, as Dirk, in a sudden excess of alarm, had to call out the man from the garage once again. He was slower to arrive with his truck this time and bad-tempered with drink when at last he did.
He emitted a few intemperate barks of laughter at Dirk’s predicament, then fumbled the bonnet of his car open and subjected him to all kinds of muttered talk about manifolds, pumps, alternators and starlings and resolutely would not be drawn on whether or not he was going to be able to get the thing to go again that night.
Dirk was unable to get a meaningful answer, or at least an answer that meant anything to him, as to what was causing the rumpus in the alternator, what ailed the fuel pump, in what way the operation of the starter motor was being disrupted and why the timing was off.
He did at last understand that the mechanic was also claiming that a family of starlings had at some time in the past made their nest in a sensitive part of the engine’s workings and had subsequently perished horribly, taking sensitive parts of the engine with them, and at this point Dirk began to cast about himself desperately for what to do.
He noticed that the mechanic’s pickup truck was standing nearby with its engine still running, and elected to make off with this instead. Being a slightly less slow and cumbersome runner than the mechanic, he was able to put this plan into operation with a minimum of difficulty.
He swung out into the lane, drove off into the night and parked three miles down the road. He left the van’s lights on, let down its tires and hid himself behind a tree. After about ten minutes his Jaguar came hurtling round the corner, passed the van, hauled itself to an abrupt halt and reversed wildly back toward it. The mechanic threw open the door, leaped out and hurried over to reclaim his property, leaving Dirk with the opportunity he needed to leap from behind the tree and reclaim his own.
He spun his wheels pointedly and drove off in a kind of grim triumph, still haunted, nevertheless, by anxieties to which he was unable to give a name or shape.
Kate, in the meantime, had joined the dimly glowing yellow stream that led on eventually through the western suburbs of Acton and Ealing and into the heart of London. She crawled up over the Westway flyover and soon afterward turned north up towards Primrose Hill and home.
She always enjoyed driving up alongside the park, and the dark night shapes of the trees soothed her and made her long for the quietness of her bed.
She found the nearest parking space she could to her front door, which was about thirty yards distant. She climbed out of the car and carefully omitted to lock it. She never left anything of value in it, and she found that it was to her advantage if people didn’t have to break anything in order to find that out. The car had been stolen twice, but on each occasion it had been found abandoned twenty yards away.
She didn’t go straight home but set off instead in the opposite direction to get some milk and bin liners from the small corner shop in the next street. She agreed with the gentle-faced Pakistani who ran it that she did indeed look tired and should have an early night, but on the way back she made another small diversion to go and lean against the railings of the park, gaze into its darkness for a few minutes, and breathe in some of its cold, heavy night air. At last she started to head back toward her flat. She turned into her own road, and as she passed the first streetlamp it flickered and went out, leaving her in a small pool of darkness.
That sort of thing always gives one a nasty turn.
It is said that there is nothing surprising about the notion, for instance, of a person suddenly thinking about someone he hasn’t thought about for years, and then discovering the next day that the person has in fact just died. There are always lots of people suddenly remembering people they haven’t thought about for ages, and always lots of people dying. In a population the size of, say, America, the law of averages means that this particular coincidence must happen at least ten times a day, but it is none the less spooky to anyone who experiences it.
By the same token, there are light bulbs burning out in streetlamps all the time, and a fair few of them must go pop just as someone is passing beneath them. Even so, it still gives the person concerned a nasty turn, especially when the very next streetlamp they pass under does exactly the same thing.
Kate stood rooted to the spot.
If one coincidence can occur, she told herself, then another coincidence can occur. And if one coincidence happens to occur just after another coincidence, then that is just a coincidence. There was absolutely nothing to feel alarmed about in having a couple of streetlamps go pop. She was in a perfectly normal friendly street with houses all around her with their lights on. She looked up at the house next to her, unfortunately just as the lights in its front window chanced to go out. This was presumably because the occupants happened to choose that moment to leave the room, but though it just went to show what a truly extraordinary thing coincidence can be, it did little to improve her state of mind.
The rest of the street was still bathed in a dim yellow glow. It was only the few feet immediately around her that were suddenly dark. The next pool of light was just a few footsteps away in front of her. She took a deep breath, pulled herself together, and walked toward it, reaching its very center at the exact instant that it, too, extinguished itself.
The occupants of the two houses she had passed on the way also happened to choose that moment to leave their front rooms, as did their neighbors on the opposite side of the street.
Perhaps a popular television show had just finished. That’s what it was. Everyone was getting up and turning off their TV sets and lights simultaneously, and the resulting power surge was blowing some of the streetlamps. Something like that. The resulting power surge was also making her blood pound a little. She moved on, trying to be calm. As soon as she got home she’d have a look in the paper to see what the program had been that had caused three streetlamps to blow.
Four.
She stopped and stood absolutely still under the dark lamp. More houses were darkening. What she found particularly alarming was that they darkened at the very moment that she looked at them.
Glance—pop.
She tried it again.
Glance—pop.
Each one she looked at darkened ins
tantly.
Glance—pop.
She realized with a sudden start of fear that she must stop herself from looking at the ones that were still lit. The rationalizations she had been trying to construct were now running around inside her head screaming to be let out, and she let them go. She tried to lock her eyes to the ground for fear of extinguishing the whole street, but couldn’t help tiny glances to see if it was working.
Glance—pop.
She froze her gaze down on to the narrow path forward. Most of the road was dark now.
There were three remaining streetlamps between her and the front door that led to her own flat. Though she kept her eyes averted, she thought she could detect on the periphery of her vision that the lights of the flat downstairs from hers were lit.
Neil lived there. She couldn’t remember his last name, but he was a part-time bass player and antiques dealer who used to give her decorating advice she didn’t want and also stole her milk—so her relationship with him had always remained at a slightly frosty level. Just at the moment, though, she was praying that he was there to tell her what was wrong with her sofa, and that his light would not go out as her eyes wavered from the pavement in front of her, with its three remaining pools of light spaced evenly along the way she had to tread.
For a moment she tried turning, and looked back the way she had come. All was darkness, shading off into the blackness of the park, which no longer calmed but menaced her, with hideously imagined thick, knotted roots and treacherous, dark, rotting litter.
Again she turned, sweeping her eyes low.
Three pools of light.
The streetlights did not extinguish as she looked at them, only as she passed.
She squeezed her eyes closed and visualized exactly where the lamp of the next streetlight was, above and in front of her. She raised her head and carefully opened her eyes again, staring directly into the orange glow radiating through the thick glass.
It shone steadily.
With her eyes locked fast on it so that it burned squiggles on her retina, she moved cautiously forward, step by step, exerting her will on it to stay burning as she approached. It continued to glow.
She stepped forward again. It continued to glow. Again she stepped. Still it glowed. Now she was almost beneath it, craning her neck to keep it in focus.
She moved forward once more and saw the filament within the glass flicker and quickly die away, leaving an afterimage prancing madly in her eyes.
She dropped her eyes now and tried looking steadily forward, but wild shapes were leaping everywhere and she felt she was losing control. The next lamp she took a lunging run toward, and again, sudden darkness enveloped her arrival. She stopped there panting, and blinking, trying to calm herself again and get her vision sorted out. Looking toward the last streetlamp, she thought she saw a figure standing beneath it. It was a large form, silhouetted with jumping orange shadows. Huge horns stood upon the figure’s head.
She stared with mad intensity into the billowing darkness, and suddenly screamed at it, “Who are you?”
There was a pause, and then a deep answering voice said, “Do you have anything that can get these bits of floorboard off my back?”
16
THERE WAS ANOTHER pause, of a different and slightly disordered quality.
It was a long one, it hung there nervously, wondering which direction it was going to get broken from. The darkened street took on a withdrawn, defensive aspect.
“What?” Kate screamed back at the figure, at last. “I said . . . what?”
The great figure stirred. Kate still could not see him properly because her eyes were still dancing with blue shadows, seared there by the orange light.
“I was,” said the figure, “glued to the floor. My father—”
“Did you . . . are you . . .” Kate quivered with incoherent rage, “are you responsible . . . for all this?” She turned and swept an angry hand around the street to indicate the nightmare she had just traversed.
“It is important that you know who I am.”
“Oh yeah?” said Kate. “Well let’s get the name down right now so I can take it straight to the police and get you done for breach of something willful or other. Intimidation. Interfering with—”
“I am Thor. I am the God of Thunder. The God of Rain. The God of the High Towering Clouds. The God of Lightning. The God of the Flowing Currents. The God of the Particles. The God of the Shaping and the Binding Forces. The God of the Wind. The God of the Growing Crops. The God of the Hammer Mjollnir.”
“Are you?” simmered Kate. “Well, I’ve no doubt that if you’d picked a slack moment to mention all that, I might have taken an interest, but right now it just makes me very angry. Turn the damn lights on!”
“I am—”
“I said, Turn the lights on!”
With something of a sheepish glow, the streetlights all came back on, and the windows of the houses all quietly illuminated themselves once more. The lamp above Kate popped again almost immediately. She shot him a warning look.
“It was an old light, and infirm,” he said.
She simply continued to glare at him.
“See,” he said, “I have your address.” He held out the piece of paper she had given him at the airport, as if that somehow explained everything and put the world to rights.
“I—”
“Back!” he shouted, throwing up his arms in front of his face.
“What?”
With a huge rush of wind, a swooping eagle dropped from out of the night sky with its talons outspread to catch at him. Thor beat and thrashed at it until the great bird flailed backward, turned, nearly crashed to the ground, recovered itself, and with great slow beats of its wings heaved itself back up through the air and perched on top of the streetlamp. It grasped the lamp hard with its talons and steadied itself, making the whole lamppost quiver very slightly in its grip.
“Go!” Thor shouted at it.
The eagle sat there and peered down at him. A monstrous creature made more monstrous by the effect of the orange light on which it perched, casting huge, flapping shadows on the nearby houses, it had strange circular markings on its wings. These were markings that Kate wondered if she had seen before, only in a nightmare, but then again she was by no means certain that she was not in a nightmare now.
There was no doubt that she had found the man she was looking for. The same huge form, the same glacial eyes, the same look of arrogant exasperation and slight muddle, only this time his feet were plunged into huge hide boots, great furs, straps and thongs hung from his shoulders, a huge steel horned helmet stood on his head, and his exasperation was directed this time not at an airline check-in girl but at a huge eagle perched on a lamppost in the middle of Primrose Hill.
“Go,” he shouted at it again. “The matter is beyond my power! All that I can do I have done! Your family is provided for. You I can do nothing more for! I myself am powerless and sick.”
Kate was suddenly shocked to see that there were great gouges on the big man’s left forearm where the eagle had got its talons into him and ripped them through his skin. Blood was welling up out of them like bread out of a baking tin.
“Go!” he shouted again. With the edge of one hand he scraped the blood off his other arm and flung the heavy drops at the eagle, which reared back, flapping, but retained its hold. Suddenly the man leaped high into the air and grappled himself to the top of the lamppost, which now began to shake dangerously under their combined weight. With loud cries the eagle pecked viciously at him while he tried with great swings of his free arm to sweep it from its perch.
A door opened. It was the front door of Kate’s house, and a man with gray-rimmed spectacles and a neat moustache looked out. It was Neil, Kate’s downstairs neighbor, in a mood.
“Look, I really think—” he started. However, it quickly became clear that he simply didn’t know what to think, and he retreated back indoors, taking his mood, unsatisfied, with him.
&nbs
p; The big man braced himself, and with a huge leap hurled himself through the air and landed with a slight, controlled wobble on top of the next lamppost, which bent slightly under his weight. He crouched, glaring at the eagle, which glared back.
“Go!” he shouted again, brandishing his arm at it.
“Gaarh!” it screeched back at him.
With another swing of his arm he pulled from under his furs a great short-handled sledgehammer and hefted its great weight meaningfully from one hand to another. The head of the hammer was a roughly cast piece of iron about the size and shape of a pint of beer in a big glass mug, and its shaft was a stocky, wrist-thick piece of ancient oak with leather strapping bound about its handle.
“Gaaarrrh!” screeched the eagle again, but regarded the sledgehammer with keen-eyed suspicion. As Thor began slowly to swing the hammer, the eagle shifted its weight tensely from one leg to the other, in time to the rhythm of the swings.
“Go!” said Thor again, more quietly, but with greater menace. He rose to his full height on top of the lamppost and swung the hammer faster and faster in a great circle. Suddenly he hurled it directly toward the eagle. In the same instant a bolt of high-voltage electricity erupted from the lamp on which the eagle was sitting, causing it to leap with loud cries wildly into the air. The hammer sailed harmlessly under the lamp, swung up into the air and out over the darkness of the park, while Thor, released of its weight, wobbled and tottered on top of his lamppost, spun round and regained his balance. Flailing madly at the air with its huge wings, the eagle, too, regained control of itself, flew upward, made one last diving attack on Thor, which the god leaped backward off the lamppost to avoid, and then climbed up and away into the night sky, in which it quickly became a small, dark speck and then at last was gone.
The hammer came bounding back from out of the sky, scraped flying sparks from the paving stones with its head, turned over twice in the air and then dropped its head back to the ground next to Kate and rested its shaft gently against her leg.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set Page 38
