“But listen, Mr. Gently. I think you understand my position. We’ve been pretty frank with each other and I’ve felt good about that. There are certain sensitivities involved, of course, and I’m also in a position to be able to make a lot of things happen. So perhaps we can come to any one of a number of possible accommodations. Anything you want, Mr. Gently, it can be made to happen.”
“Just to see you dead, Mr. Draycott,” said Dirk Gently, “just to see you dead.”
“Well, fuck you, too.”
Dirk Gently turned and left the room and went to tell his new client that he thought they might have a problem.
31
A LITTLE WHILE later a dark-blue BMW pulled quietly away from the otherwise deserted forecourt of Saint Pancras station and moved off up the quiet streets.
Somewhat dejected, Dirk Gently put on his hat and left his newly acquired and newly relinquished client, who said that he wished to be alone now and maybe turn into a rat or something like some other people he could mention.
He closed the great doors behind him and walked slowly out on to the balcony overlooking the great vaulted hall of gods and heroes, Valhalla. He arrived just as the last few stragglers of the revels were fading away, presumably to emerge at the same moment in the great vaulted train shed of Saint Pancras station. He stayed staring for a while at the empty hall, in which the bonfires now were just fading embers.
It then took the very slightest flicker of his head for him to perform the same transition himself, and he found himself standing in a gusty and disheveled corridor of the empty Midland Grand Hotel. Out in the great dark concourse of Saint Pancras station he saw again the last stragglers from Valhalla shuffling away and out into the cold streets of London to find benches that were designed not to be slept on, and to try to sleep on them.
He sighed and tried to find his way out of the derelict hotel, a task that proved more difficult than he anticipated, as immense and as dark and as labyrinthine as it was. He found at last the great winding Gothic staircase which led all the way down to the huge arches of the entrance lobby, decorated with carvings of dragons and griffins and heavy ornamental ironwork. The main front entrance was locked, as it had been for years, and eventually Dirk found his way down a side corridor to an exit manned by a great sweaty splodge of a man who guarded it at night. He demanded to know how Dirk had gained entrance to the hotel and refused to be satisfied by any of his explanations. In the end he had simply to allow Dirk to leave, since there was little else he could do.
Dirk crossed from this entrance to the entrance into the station booking hall, and then into the station itself. For a while he simply stood there looking around, and then he left via the main station entrance and descended the steps which led down onto the Saint Pancras Road. As he emerged onto the street he was so surprised not to be instantly swooped upon by a passing eagle that he tripped and stumbled and was run over by the first of the early morning’s motorcycle couriers.
32
WITH A HUGE crash, Thor surged through the wall at the far end of the great hall of Valhalla and stood ready to proclaim to the assembled gods and heroes that he had finally managed to break through to Norway and had found a copy of the contract Odin had signed buried deep in the side of a mountain, but he couldn’t, because they’d all gone and there was no one there.
“There’s no one here,” he said to Kate, releasing her from his huge grip. “They’ve all gone.”
He slumped in disappointment.
“Wh—” said Kate.
“We’ll try the old man’s chambers,” said Thor, and hurled his hammer up to the balcony with themselves in tow.
He stalked through the great chambers, ignoring Kate’s pleas, protests and general abuse.
He wasn’t there.
“He’s here somewhere,” said Thor angrily, trailing his hammer behind him.
“Wh—”
“We’ll go through the world divide,” he said, and took hold of Kate again. They flicked themselves through.
They were in a large bedroom suite in the hotel.
Litter and scraps of rotting carpet covered the floors, the windows were grimy with years of neglect.
Pigeon droppings were everywhere, and the peeling paintwork made it look as if several small families of starfish had exploded on the walls.
There was an abandoned trolleybed in the middle of the floor in which an old man lay in beautifully laundered linen, weeping from his one remaining eye.
“I found the contract, you bastard,” raged Thor, waving it at him. “I found the deal you did. You sold all our power to . . . to a lawyer and a . . . an advertiser and, and all sorts of other people. You stole our power! You couldn’t steal all of mine because I’m too strong, but you kept me bewildered and confused, and made bad things happen every time I got angry. You prevented me getting back home to Norway by every method you could, because you knew I’d find this! You and that poison dwarf Toe Rag. You’ve been abusing and humiliating me for years, and—”
“Yes, yes, we know all that,” said Odin.
“Well . . . good!”
“Thor—” said Kate.
“Well, I’ve shaken all that off now!” shouted Thor.
“Yes, I see—”
“I went somewhere I could get good and angry in peace, when I knew you’d be otherwise occupied and expecting me to be here, and I had a hell of a good shout and blew things up a bit, and I’m all right now! And I’m going to tear this up for a start!”
He ripped right through the contract, threw the pieces in the air and incinerated them with a look.
“Thor—” said Kate.
“And I’m going to put right all the things you made happen so I’d be afraid of getting angry. The poor girl at the airline check-in desk that got turned into a drink machine. Woof! Wham! She’s back! The jet fighter that tried to shoot me down when I was flying to Norway! Woof! Wham! It’s back! See, I’m back in control of myself!”
“What jet fighter?” asked Kate. “You haven’t told me about a jet fighter.”
“It tried to shoot me down over the North Sea. We had a scrap and in the heat of the moment I, well, I turned it into an eagle, and it’s been bothering me ever since. So now that’s dealt with. Don’t look at me like that. I did what I could. I took care of his wife by fixing one of those lottery things. Look,” he added angrily, “all this has been very difficult for me, you know. All right. What else?”
“My table lamp,” said Kate quietly.
“And Kate’s table lamp! It shall be a small kitten no more! Woof! Wham! Thor speaks and it is so! What was that noise?”
A ruddy glow was spreading across the London skyline.
“Thor, I think there’s something wrong with your father.”
“I should bloody well hope so. Oh. What’s wrong? Father? Are you all right?”
“I have been so very, very foolish and unwise,” wept Odin. “I have been so wicked and evil, and—”
“Yes, well, that’s what I think, too,” said Thor and sat on the end of the bed. “So what are we going to do?”
“I don’t think I could live without my linen, and my Sister Bailey, and . . . it’s been so, so, so long, and I’m so, so old. Toe Rag said I should kill you, but I . . . I would rather have killed myself. Oh, Thor . . .”
“Oh,” said Thor. “I see. Well. I don’t know what to do now. Blast. Blast everything.”
“Thor—”
“Yes, yes, what is it?”
“Thor, it’s very simple what you do about your father and the Woodshead,” said Kate.
“Oh, yes? What then?”
“I’ll tell you on one condition.”
“Oh, really? And what’s that?”
“That you tell me how many stones there are in Wales.”
“What!” exclaimed Thor in outrage. “Away from me! That’s years of my life you’re talking about!”
Kate shrugged.
“No!” said Thor. “Anything but that! Anywa
y,” he added sullenly, “I told you.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Yes I did. I said I lost count somewhere in Mid-Glamorgan. Well, I was hardly going to start again, was I? Think, girl, think!”
33
BEATING A PATH through the difficult territory to the northeast of Valhalla—a network of paths that seemed to lead only to other paths and then back to the first paths again for another try—went two figures, one a big, stupid, violent creature with green eyes and a scythe which hung from its belt and often seriously impeded its progress, the other a small, crazed creature who clung onto the back of the bigger one, maniacally urging him on while actually impeding his progress still further.
They attained at last a long, low, smelly building into which they hurried, shouting for horses. The old stable master came forward, recognized them and, having heard already of their disgrace, was at first disinclined to help them on their way. The scythe flashed through the air and the stable master’s head started upward in surprise while his body took an affronted step backward, swayed uncertainly, and then, for lack of any further instructions to the contrary, keeled over backward in its own time. His head bounded into the hay.
His assailants hurriedly lashed up two horses to a cart and clattered away out of the stable yard and along the broader thoroughfare which led upward to the north.
They made rapid progress up the road for a mile, Toe Rag urging the horses on frantically with a long and cruel whip. After a few minutes, however, the horses began to slow down and to look about them uneasily. Toe Rag lashed them all the harder, but they became more anxious still, then suddenly lost all control and reared in terror, turning over the cart and tipping its occupants out on the ground, from which they instantly sprang up in a rage.
Toe Rag screamed at the terrified horses and then, out of the corner of his eye, caught sight of what had so disturbed them.
It wasn’t so terrifying. It was just a large white metal box, upturned on a pile of rubbish by the roadside and rattling itself.
The horses were rearing and trying to bolt away from the big white rattling thing, but they were impossibly entangled in their traces. They were only working themselves up into a thrashing lather of panic. Toe Rag quickly realized that there would be no calming them until the box was dealt with.
“Whatever it is,” he screeched at the green-eyed creature, “kill it!”
Green-eye unhooked his scythe from his belt once more and clambered up the pile of rubbish to where the box was rattling. He kicked it and it only rattled the more. He got his foot behind it and with a heavy thrust shoved it away down the heap. The big white box slithered a foot or so then turned over and toppled to the ground. It rested there for a moment and then a door, finally freed, flew open. The horses screamed in fear.
Toe Rag and his green-eyed thug approached the thing with worried curiosity, then staggered back in horror as a great and powerful new god erupted from its innards.
34
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, at a comfortable distance from all these events, set at a comfortable distance from a well-proportioned window through which the afternoon light was streaming, lay an elderly one-eyed man in a white bed. A newspaper sat like a half-collapsed tent on the floor, where it had been hurled two minutes before.
The man was awake but not glad to be. His exquisitely frail hands lay slightly curled on the pure white linen sheets and quivered very faintly.
His name was variously given as Mr. Odwin, or Wodin, or Odin. He was—is—a god, and furthermore he was a confused and startled god.
He was confused and startled because of the report he had just been reading on the front page of the newspaper, which was that another god had been cutting loose and making a nuisance of himself. It didn’t say so in so many words, of course, it merely described what had happened last night when a missing jet fighter aircraft had mysteriously erupted under full power from out of a house in North London into which it could not conceivably have been thought to have fitted. It had instantly lost its wings and gone into a screaming dive and crashed and exploded in a main road. The pilot had managed to eject during the few seconds he had had in the air, and had landed, shaken, bruised, but otherwise unharmed, and babbling about strange men with hammers flying over the North Sea.
Luckily, because of the time at which the inexplicable disaster had occurred, the roads were almost deserted, and apart from massive damage to property, the only fatalities to have occurred were the as yet unidentified occupants of a car which was thought to have been possibly a BMW and possibly blue, though because of the rather extreme nature of the accident it was rather hard to tell.
He was very, very tired and did not want to think about it, did not want to think about last night, did not want to think of anything other than linen sheets and how wonderful it was when Sister Bailey patted them down around him as she had just now, just five minutes ago, and again just ten minutes before that.
The American girl, Kate something, came into his room. He wished she would just let him sleep. She was going on about something being all fixed up. She congratulated him on having extremely high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels and a very dicky heart, as a consequence of which the hospital would be very glad to accept him as a lifelong patient in return for his entire estate. They didn’t even care to know what his estate was worth, because it would clearly be sufficient to cover a stay as brief as his was likely to be.
She seemed to expect him to be pleased, so he nodded amiably, thanked her vaguely, and drifted, drifted happily off to sleep.
35
THE SAME AFTERNOON Dirk Gently awoke, also in the hospital, suffering from mild concussion, scrapes and bruises and a broken leg. He had had the greatest difficulty in explaining, on admittance, that most of his injuries had been caused by a small boy and an eagle, and that really, being run over by a motorcycle courier was a relatively restful experience since it mostly involved lying down a lot and not being swooped on every two minutes.
He was kept under sedation—in other words, he slept—for most of the morning, suffering terrible dreams in which Toe Rag and a green-eyed, scythe-bearing giant made their escape to the northeast from Valhalla, where they were unexpectedly accosted and consumed by a newly created, immense Guilt God which had finally escaped from what looked suspiciously like an upturned refrigerator on a skip.
He was relieved to be woken at last from this by a cheery “Oh, it’s you, is it? You nicked my book.”
He opened his eyes and was greeted by the sight of Sally Mills, the girl he had been violently accosted by the previous day in the café, for no better reason than that he had, prior to nicking her book, nicked her coffee.
“Well, I’m glad to see you took my advice and came in to have your nose properly attended to,” she said as she fussed around him. “Pretty roundabout way you seem to have taken, but you’re here, and that’s the main thing. You caught up with the girl you were interested in, did you? Oddly enough, you’re in the very bed that she was in. If you see her again, perhaps you could give her this pizza which she arranged to have delivered before checking herself out. It’s all cold now, but the courier did insist that she was very adamant it should be delivered.
“I don’t mind you nicking the book, really, though. I don’t know why I buy them really, they’re not very good, only everyone always does, don’t they? Somebody told me there’s a rumor he had entered into a pact with the devil or something. I think that’s nonsense, though I did hear another story about him which I much preferred. Apparently he’s always having these mysterious deliveries of chickens to his hotel rooms, and no one dares to ask why or even guess what it is he wants them for, because nobody ever sees a single scrap of them again. Well, I met somebody who knows exactly what he wants them for. The somebody I met once had the job of secretly smuggling the chickens straight back out of his rooms again. What Howard Bell gets out of it is a reputation for being a very strange and demonic man, and everybody buys his books
. Nice work if you can get it is what I say. Anyway, I expect you don’t want to have me nattering to you all afternoon, and even if you do I’ve got better things to do. Sister says you’ll probably be discharged this evening so you can go to your own home and sleep in your own bed, which I’m sure you’ll much prefer. Anyway, hope you feel better, here’s a couple of newspapers.”
Dirk took the papers, glad to be left alone at last.
He first turned to see what The Great Zaganza had to say about his day. The Great Zaganza said, “You are very fat and stupid and persistently wear a ridiculous hat which you should be ashamed of.”
He grunted slightly to himself about this, and turned to the horoscope in the other paper.
It said, “Today is a day to enjoy home comforts.”
Yes, he thought, he would be glad to get back home. He was still strangely relieved about getting rid of his old fridge and looked forward to enjoying a new phase of fridge ownership with the spanking new model currently sitting in his kitchen at home.
There was the eagle to think about, but he would worry about that later, when he got home.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set Page 47
