Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set

by Douglas Adams

  It vanished almost instantly into the murky haze of the sky. Damp flashes sparked deep within the clouds, tracking its path in a long parabola through the night. At the farthest extent of the parabola it swung down out of the clouds, a distant tiny pinpoint, moving slowly now, gathering and redirecting its momentum for the return flight. Kate watched, breathless, as the speck crept behind the dome of Saint Paul’s. It then seemed almost as if it had halted altogether, hanging silently and improbably in the air, before gradually beginning to increase microscopically in size as it accelerated back toward them.

  Then, as it returned, it swung aside in its path, no longer describing a simple parabola, but following instead a new path that seemed to lie along the perimeter of a gigantic Möbius strip, which took it around the other side of the Telecom Tower. Then suddenly it was swinging back in a path directly toward them, hurtling out of the night with impossible weight and speed like a piston in a shaft of light. Kate swayed and nearly dropped in a dead faint out of its path, when Thor stepped forward and caught it with a grunt.

  The jolt of it sent a single heavy shudder down into the earth, and then the thing was resting quietly in Thor’s grip. His arm quivered slightly and was still.

  Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn’t know exactly what it was that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that it was the sort of experience that her mother would not have approved of on a first date.

  “Is this all part of what we have to do to go to Asgard?” she said. “Or are you just fooling around?”

  “We will go to Asgard . . . now,” he said.

  At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple, but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement. The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then snapped back again as a suddenly different world.

  This world was a much darker one and colder still.

  A bitter, putrid wind blew sharply, and made every breath gag in the throat. The ground beneath their feet was no longer the soft muddy grass of the hill, but a foul-smelling, oozing slush. Darkness lay over all the horizon with a few small exceptional fires dotted here and there in the distance, and one great blaze of light about a mile and a half away to the southeast.

  Here, great fantastical towers stabbed at the night; huge pinnacles and turrets flickered in the firelight that surged from a thousand windows. It was an edifice that mocked reason, ridiculed reality and jeered wildly at the night.

  “My father’s palace,” said Thor, “the Great Hall of Valhalla, where we must go.”

  It was just on the tip of Kate’s tongue to say that something about the place was oddly familiar when the sound of horses’ hooves pounding through the mud came to them on the wind. At a distance, between where they stood and the Great Hall of Valhalla, a small number of flickering torches could be seen jolting toward them.

  Thor once more studied the head of his hammer with interest, brushed it with his forefinger and rubbed it with his thumb. Then slowly he looked up, again he twisted around once, then twice and a third time, and then hurled the missile into the sky. This time, however, he continued to hold onto its shaft with his right hand, while with his left he held Kate’s waist in his grasp.

  25

  CIGARETTES CLEARLY INTENDED to make themselves a major problem for Dirk tonight.

  For most of the day, except for when he’d woken up, and except for again shortly after he’d woken up, and except for when he had just encountered the revolving head of Geoffrey Anstey, which was understandable, and also except for when he’d been in the pub with Kate, he had had absolutely no cigarettes at all.

  No one. They were out of his life, foresworn utterly. He didn’t need them. He could do without them. They merely nagged at him like mad and made his life a living hell, but he decided he could handle that.

  Now, however, just when he had suddenly decided, coolly, rationally, as a clear, straightforward decision rather than merely a feeble surrender to craving, that he would, after all, have a cigarette, could he find one? He could not.

  The pubs, by this stage of the night, were well closed. The late night corner shop obviously meant something different by “late night” than Dirk did, and though Dirk was certain that he could convince the proprietor of the rightness of his case through sheer linguistic and syllogistic bravado, the wretched man wasn’t there to undergo it.

  A mile away there was a twenty-four-hour filling station, but it turned out just to have sustained an armed robbery. The plate glass was shattered and crazed around a tiny hole, police were swarming over the place. The attendant was apparently not badly injured, but he was still losing blood from a wound in his arm, having hysterics and being treated for shock, and no one would sell Dirk any cigarettes. They simply weren’t in the mood.

  “You could buy cigarettes in the blitz,” protested Dirk. “People took a pride in it. Even with the bombs falling and the whole city ablaze you could still get served. Some poor fellow, just lost two daughters and a leg, would still say ‘Plain or filter-tipped?’ if you asked him.”

  “I expect you would, too,” muttered a white-faced young policeman.

  “It was the spirit of the age,” said Dirk.

  “Bug off,” said the policeman.

  And that, thought Dirk to himself, was the spirit of this. He retreated, miffed, and decided to prowl the streets with his hands in his pockets for a while.

  Camden Passage. Antique clocks. Antique clothes. No cigarettes.

  Upper Street. Antique buildings being ripped apart. No sign of cigarette shops being put up in their place.

  Chapel Market, desolate at night. Wet litter wildly flapping. Cardboard boxes, egg boxes, paper bags and cigarette packets—empty ones.

  Pentonville Road. Grim concrete monoliths, eying the new spaces in Upper Street where they hoped to spawn their horrid progeny.

  King’s Cross station. They must have cigarettes, for heaven’s sake. Dirk hurried on down toward it.

  The old frontage to the station reared up above the area, a great yellow brick wall with a clock tower and two huge arches fronting the two great train sheds behind. In front of this lay the one-story modern concourse already far shabbier than the building, a hundred years its senior, which it obscured and generally messed up. Dirk imagined that when the designs for the modern concourse had been drawn up the architects had explained that it entered into an exciting and challenging dialogue with the older building.

  King’s Cross is an area where terrible things happen to people, to buildings, to cars, to trains, usually while you wait, and if you weren’t careful you could easily end up involved in a piece of exciting and challenging dialogue yourself. You could have a cheap car radio fitted while you waited, and if you turned your back for a couple of minutes, it would be removed while you waited as well. Other things you could have removed while you waited were your wallet, your stomach lining, your mind and your will to live. The muggers and pushers and pimps and hamburger salesmen, in no particular order, could arrange all these things for you.

  But could they arrange a packet of cigarettes? thought Dirk, with a mounting sense of tension. He crossed York Way, declined a couple of surprising offers on the grounds that they did not involve cigarettes in any immediately obvious way, hurried past the closed bookshop and in through the main concourse doors, away from the life of the street and into the safer domain of British Rail.

  He looked around him.

  Here things seemed rather strange and he wondered why, but he only wondered this very briefly because he was also wondering if there was anywhere open selling cigarettes, and there wasn’t.

  He sagged forlornly. It seemed to him that he had been playing catch-up with the world all day. The morning had started in about as disastrous a way as it was possible for a morning to start, and he had never managed to get a proper grip on it since. He felt like somebody trying
to ride a bolting horse, with one foot in a stirrup and the other one still bounding along hopefully on the ground behind. And now even as simple a thing as a cigarette was proving to be beyond his ability to get hold of.

  He sighed and found himself a seat, or at least room, on a bench.

  This was not an immediately easy thing to do. The station was more crowded than he had expected to find it at—what was it? he looked up at the clock—one o’clock in the morning. What in the name of God was he doing at King’s Cross station at one o’clock in the morning, with no cigarette and no home that he could reasonably expect to get into without being hacked to death by a homicidal bird?

  He decided to feel sorry for himself. That would pass the time. He looked around, and after a while the impulse to feel sorry for himself gradually subsided as he began to take in his surroundings.

  What was strange about it was seeing such an immediately familiar place looking so unfamiliar. There was the ticket office, still open for ticket sales, but looking somber and beleaguered and wishing it was closed.

  There was the W. H. Smith, closed for the night. No one would be needing any further newspapers or magazines tonight, except for purposes of accommodation, and old ones would do just as well for sleeping under.

  The pimps and hookers, drug pushers and hamburger salesmen were all outside in the streets and in the hamburger bars. If you wanted quick sex or a dirty fix or, God help you, a hamburger, that was where you went to get it.

  Here were the people that nobody wanted anything from at all. This was where they gathered for shelter until they were periodically shooed out. There was something people wanted from them, in fact—their absence. That was in hot demand, but not easily supplied. Everybody has to be somewhere.

  Dirk looked from one to another of the men and women shuffling round or sitting hunched in seats or struggling to try to sleep across benches that were specifically designed to prevent them from doing exactly that.

  “Got a fag, mate?”

  “What? No, I’m sorry. No, I haven’t got one,” replied Dirk, awkwardly patting his coat pockets in embarrassment, as if to suggest the making of a search which he knew would be fruitless. He was startled to be summoned out of his reverie like this.

  “Here you are, then.” The old man offered him a beat-up one from a beat-up packet.

  “What? Oh. Oh—thanks. Thank you.” Momentarily taken aback by the offer. Dirk nevertheless accepted the cigarette gratefully, and took a light from the tip of the cigarette the old man was smoking himself.

  “What you come here for then?” asked the old man—not challenging, just curious.

  Dirk tried to look at him without making it seem as if he was looking him up and down. The man was wildly bereft of teeth, had startled and matted hair, and his old clothes were well mulched down around him, but the eyes which sagged out of his face were fairly calm. He wasn’t expecting anything worse than he could deal with to happen to him.

  “Well, just this, in fact,” said Dirk, twiddling the cigarette. “Thanks. Couldn’t find one anywhere.”

  “Oh ah,” said the old man.

  “Got this mad bird at home,” said Dirk. “Kept attacking me.”

  “Oh ah,” said the man, nodding resignedly.

  “I mean an actual bird,” said Dirk. “An eagle.”

  “Oh ah.”

  “With great wings.”

  “Oh ah.”

  “Got hold of me with one of its talons through the letter box.”

  “Oh ah.”

  Dirk wondered if it was worth pursuing the conversation much further. He lapsed into silence and looked around.

  “You’re lucky it didn’t slash at you with its beak as well,” said the old man after a while. “An eagle will do that when roused.”

  “It did!” said Dirk. “It did! Look, right here on my nose. That was through the letter box as well. You’d scarcely believe it! Talk about grip! Talk about reach! Look at what it did to my hand!”

  He held it out for sympathy. The old man gave it an appraising look.

  “Oh ah,” he said at last, and retreated into his own thoughts.

  Dirk drew his injured hand back.

  “Know a lot about eagles, then, do you?”

  The man didn’t answer, but seemed instead to retreat still further.

  “Lot of people here tonight,” Dirk ventured again, after a while.

  The man shrugged. He took a long drag on his cigarette, half-closing his eyes against the smoke.

  “Is it always like this? I mean, are there always so many people here at night?”

  The man merely looked down, slowly releasing the smoke from his mouth and nostrils.

  Yet again, Dirk looked around. A man a few feet away, not so old-looking as Dirk’s companion, but wildly deranged in his demeanor, had sat nodding hectically over a bottle of cooking brandy all this time. He slowly stopped his nodding, with difficulty screwed a cap on the bottle, and slipped it into the pocket of his ragged old coat. An old fat woman who had been fitfully browsing through the bulging black bin liner of her possessions began to twist the top of it together and fold it.

  “You’d almost think that something was about to happen,” said Dirk.

  “Oh ah,” said his companion. He put his hands on his knees, bent forward and raised himself painfully to his feet. Though he was bent and slow, and though his clothes were dirt-ridden and tattered, there was some little power and authority there in his bearing.

  The air which he unsettled as he stood, which flowed out from the folds of his skin and clothes, was richly pungent even to Dirk’s numbed nostrils. It was a smell that never stopped coming at you—just as Dirk thought it must have peaked, so it struck on upward with renewed frenzy till Dirk thought that his very brain would vaporize.

  He tried not to choke, indeed, he tried to smile courteously without allowing his eyes to run, as the man turned to him and said, “Infuse some blossom of the bitter orange. Add some sprinklings of sage while it is still warm. This is very good for eagle wounds. There are those who will add apricot and almond oil and even, the heavens defend us, sedra. But then there are always those that will overdo things. And sometimes we have need of them. Oh ah.”

  With that he turned away once more and joined the growing stream of pathetic, hunched and abused bodies that were heading for the front exit from the station. In all about two, maybe three, dozen were leaving. Each seemed to be leaving separately, each for his or her entirely independent reasons, and not following too fast the one upon the other, and yet it was not hard to tell, for anyone who cared to watch these people that no one cared to watch or see, that they were leaving together and in a stream.

  Dirk carefully nursed his cigarette for a minute or so and watched them intently as one by one they left. Once he was certain that there were no more to go, and that the last two or three of them were at the door, he dropped the cigarette and ground it out with his heel. Then he noticed that the old man had left behind his crumpled cigarette packet. Dirk looked inside and saw that there were still two bedraggled cigarettes left. He pocketed it, stood up, and quietly followed at a distance that he thought was properly respectful.

  Outside on the Euston Road the night air was grumbling and unsettled. He loitered idly by the doorway, watching which way they went—to the west. He took one of the cigarettes out and lit it and then idled off westward himself, around the taxi rank and toward Saint Pancras Street.

  On the west side of Saint Pancras Street, just a few yards north of the Euston Road, a flight of steps leads up to the forecourt of the old Midland Grand Hotel, the huge, dark Gothic fantasy of a building which stands, empty and desolate, across the front of Saint Pancras railway station.

  Over the top of the steps, picked out in gold letters on wrought ironwork, stands the name of the station. Taking his time. Dirk followed the last of the band of old tramps and derelicts up these steps, which emerged just to the side of a small, squat, brick building which was used as a car park
. To the right, the great dark hulk of the old hotel spread off into the night, its roof line a vast assortment of wild turrets, gnarled spires and pinnacles which seemed to prod at and goad the night sky.

  High in the dim darkness, silent stone figures stood guard behind long shields, grouped around pilasters behind wrought-iron railings. Carved dragons crouched gaping at the sky as Dirk Gently, in his flapping leather coat, approached the great iron portals which led to the hotel, and to the great vaulted train shed of Saint Pancras station. Stone figures of winged dogs crouched down from the top of pillars.

  Here, in the bridged area between the hotel entrance and the station booking hall, was parked a large unmarked gray Mercedes van. A quick glance at the front of it was enough to tell Dirk that it was the same one which had nearly forced him off the road several hours earlier in the Cotswolds.

  Dirk walked into the booking hall, a large space with great paneled walls along which were spaced fat marble columns in the form of torch holders.

  At this time of night the ticket office was closed—trains do not run all night from Saint Pancras—and beyond it the vast chamber of the station itself, the great Victorian train shed, was shrouded in darkness and shadow.

  Dirk stood quietly secluded in the entrance to the booking hall and watched as the old tramps and bag ladies, who had entered the station by the main entrance from the forecourt, mingled together in the dimness. There were now many more than two dozen of them, perhaps as many as a hundred, and there seemed to be about them an air of repressed excitement and tension.

  As they moved about, it seemed to Dirk after a while that, though he had been surprised at how many of them there had been when he first arrived, there seemed now to be fewer and fewer of them. He peered into the gloom trying to make out what was happening. He detached himself from his seclusion in the entrance to the booking hall and entered the main vault, but kept himself nevertheless as close to the side wall as possible as he ventured in toward them.