Barking

by Tom Holt

  ‘All right,’ she rasped. ‘Stop it, you’re hurting.’

  Not that lying on top of women had featured all that much in his life to date; but if this was typical, it was an overrated pastime. For one thing, their elbows dig into your solar plexus. He opened his mouth to say, No, I’m not, you’re dead, dead people don’t feel pain. But he didn’t, for some reason. Instead, he slackened off the weight on the belt just a little.

  ‘We meet again, Bowden Allshapes,’ he said.

  He’d expected it to sound rather better than it did. She didn’t seem particularly impressed. She just gurgled, ‘Get off me, you clumsy idiot, you’re squashing my arm.’ Curiously, it was one of the things Sally had said to him more than once during their married life, but all in all he was prepared to accept it as a coincidence.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘And don’t go changing into a hedgehog or anything. It takes you just over two-thirds of a second to do a transformation. Think how tight I could get this belt in two-thirds of a second.’

  A good argument clearly presented: the secret of successful advocacy. She called Duncan a very vulgar name and became perfectly still. Good old brute force, he thought. Trial by combat: an unjustly neglected branch of litigation, in his view, since it’s invariably cheaper, quicker and fairer than the usual forms of dispute resolution used in the UK, not to mention a damn sight less traumatic for the participants.

  ‘All right,’ she grunted. ‘Just think, though. If that Veronica happened to wander past right now, what do you think she’d make of us?’

  ‘Good point,’ Duncan said, and stood up, dragging her to her feet with a brutal jerk of the wrist. ‘Attention to detail. I approve of that.’ She yelped, and for a split second he grinned the relieved smile of the man whose theory has just been proved right. ‘Let’s find an empty office or something and discuss this like civilised monsters,’ he said.

  As if on cue, he noticed a half-open door. It led into a sort of boardroom, with a long, shiny table and lots of chairs. He wrestled her into one of them with a couple of yanks of the belt, and sat down next to her.

  ‘Cosy, this,’ he said. She gave him a look, but it bounced off. ‘Just to clarify before we get started. You do anything that makes me think you’re about to change shape or something like that, and I’ll pull hard on the belt and throttle you.’ He paused and looked at her. ‘You don’t like pain, do you?’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it hurts, you see.’

  ‘Quite. But you really don’t like it. Which is odd, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, actually. I think you’ll find it’s pretty unpopular generally. Like rice pudding, or the government.’

  Duncan shook his head. ‘When Wesley Loop and I were beating the shit out of each other - actually, it was a bit more one-sided than that, but on the few occasions when I managed to land one on him, he hardly seemed to notice. And that bloke you were with earlier, your driver. George. I don’t think they really felt anything, either of them. I mean, Wesley got annoyed when I threw him against walls, but it was just the inconvenience rather than agony or anything. I think they didn’t feel it because they’re dead. Or undead, or whatever the technical term is. I think pain’s the body’s way of warning you that you’re about to come to harm. If you’re dead already, why bother? It’s just discomfort which serves no purpose. Well?’

  She frowned, then nodded. ‘One of the perks of belonging to our organisation,’ she said. ‘Like a health plan, only better, I think.’

  ‘But you—’ He smiled. ‘You still feel pain, don’t you? Because you’re not like them. You’re still alive.’

  Her so-what shrug was nearly perfect, but not quite. ‘You make it sound like it’s unusual,’ she said. ‘But loads of people are alive every day.’

  ‘Not people like you.’

  A slight glow of irrepressible pride as she answered, ‘There are no people like me. I’m unique.’

  Duncan nodded. ‘Let’s hear it for small mercies,’ he said. ‘And don’t even think about trying to change the subject. You’re alive. You’re this sort of incredibly rich and powerful zombie gangmaster, but you’re not one of them. You never died. Did you?’

  ‘Oh, all right, then, if it means so much to you.’ She pulled a face. ‘No, I never died. Call me an old stick-in-the-mud if you like, but—’

  ‘Sh.’ She stared at him, but she shushed. ‘Now then,’ he went on, ‘Luke Ferris told me that it’s directly because of you that there’s no natural wolves in Britain. Is that true?’

  ‘You say it like it’s a bad thing.’

  ‘So it’s true. Interesting. I don’t know the exact date offhand, but according to the History Channel or David Attenborough or whoever I got it from wolves have been extinct here for over four hundred years. So if it was you who wiped them all out—’ He hesitated, in case she denied it or something, but she just sat there trying to look bored. ‘I was going to say, four hundred years old, you’ve worn well, almost as well as Joan Collins. But then it occurred to me that I haven’t got a clue what you look like. And I’m sitting here next to you.’

  The bored look got a little colder and harder. ‘You do say the sweetest things,’ she said. ‘Would you like to see me as I really am, Mr Hughes? Just say the word.’

  ‘Not really, no,’ Duncan said very quickly, but too late. It was well over a second before he managed to snap out of it, jerk hard on the belt and look away. Strange, how something natural, like a human head, could be so much more repulsive than vampires or werewolves.’Would you mind terribly—?’

  ‘Sissy,’ she said viciously. ‘I hate people who judge by appearances. It’s all right,’ she added. ‘The scary monster’s gone now - you can look.’

  He relaxed the strain on the belt, but didn’t look back just in case. ‘As I was saying,’ he croaked, ‘you’re still alive. Unlike,’ he added, ‘most four-hundred-and-somethings. The question really is, how?’

  She sighed. ‘Oh, the usual,’ she said. ‘Healthy diet, plenty of fresh air and exercise, five fresh fruit and veg a day. That sort of thing.’

  ‘That sort of thing,’ Duncan repeated. ‘And a little bit of creative bookkeeping as well.’

  He heard a hiss, as of breath sucked in sharply. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said.

  Duncan turned to look at her. Mercifully, she’d gone back to being lovely and instantly forgettable. ‘It’s where I come in, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Because you’re not the only one who’s unique around here. Me too, in my own highly specialised way.’

  Synthesised yawn. ‘There’re all sorts of ways in which you’re different from other people,’ she said, ‘all of them either annoying or embarrassing or both. Simple tact—’

  ‘Also,’ he went on, ‘it’s how Luke got dragged into all this - him and the rest of the gang. I guess Luke must’ve said something about it to Wesley Loop, and he told you, and it all spiralled out of control from there. And there was me always assuming that Luke was the centre of the universe and I was just some sort of pathetic little moon or asteroid or something in orbit around him. And all the time, it was the other way round. It was all me, wasn’t it? From the start.’

  She didn’t bother contradicting him. Instead, she looked at him with a lack of expression so complete that he could feel it dragging him in, like a black hole. ‘More than once I’ve asked myself,’ she said, ‘why did it have to be you? Why couldn’t it have been somebody tolerable? Possibly with some tiny vestige of a personality.’

  That annoyed Duncan, and he scowled. ‘Wasn’t, though, was it? It was me. Because I was the only kid in the school, the only human being on the whole fucking planet, who could’ve done that maths homework and got precisely that particular set of answers. Nobody else, not all the Nobel prize-winners and professors of pure maths and quantum-nuclear-astrophysicists. Only me.’ For a moment, the unfairness of it all surged over him and left him speechless. Then he blurted out, ‘They were right, weren’t they? My answers, to tho
se questions. I got all the sums right.’

  She made him wait a very long time before she said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not right for anybody else, of course,’ he added bitterly. ‘Just for me.’

  ‘Well, of course. After all,’ she added, ‘you’re the only person in the world who does his sums in Base Ten Point One instead of boring conventional old Base Ten.’

  Duncan looked up sharply. ‘Is that all it is?’ he said, astonished in spite of himself. ‘One rotten decimal place out, and all this shit ends up happening to me?’

  Her eyes were like the empty space between galaxies. ‘One decimal place is all it takes,’ she said. ‘Just a very slight variation, so small you’d never notice under normal circumstances. Anything larger and it’d show, you see. It was essential that whoever I chose should look completely normal and ordinary, so nobody would ever notice. Ten-point-one instead of ten was pretty well perfect.’

  Duncan sat very still and quiet for a second or two. Then he said, ‘And that’s why I didn’t die. That day in the classroom, when Luke bashed me and I hit my head on the pipe. Because of one decimal place.’

  She sighed, as if he was being tiresome. ‘Be grateful,’ she said. ‘The fact that you’re point one out of phase with the rest of humanity saved your stupid life. I’d have thought only getting a B in maths instead of an A was a small price to pay for twenty years you wouldn’t otherwise have had.’ She slid a finger between the belt and her neck. ‘Look, is this really necessary?’ she said. ‘I think we understand each other now. And if you understand, you’ll see that your only possible future’s with us. Certainly not with Luke Ferris or these—’ She grinned. ‘These people. They may be colourful and mildly amusing for a while, but they can’t help you. Only I can do that. You do see that, don’t you?’

  Duncan shook his head. ‘Other way round, though, isn’t it?’ He pressed his little finger against the belt, applying a very slight pressure. ‘You need me, I’m the only one who can save you.’ Then he pulled a face. ‘Because of this - what did you call it? Variation? Out of phase? All sounds a bit Star Trek to me.’

  Her voice became calm and businesslike. ‘It’s perfectly simple and straightforward, actually. The thing about you is, you exist just a tiny bit out of step with everybody else. Basic, fundamental quantum theory; when the boffins get around to discovering it, in about twenty years from now, it’ll all seem so blindingly obvious that we’ll all wonder how we could’ve been so stupid as not to have figured it out before. Honestly,’ she added with feeling, ‘scientists. Clueless, the lot of them. No imagination; they can’t make the intuitive leaps. If you want them to think just a weensy bit out of the box, you’ve got to climb up a tree while they’re snoozing and pelt them with apples.’

  It took Duncan a third of a second to work out what she meant by that. Oh, he thought. ‘So that was you,’ he said. ‘Sir Isaac New—’

  ‘Yes, that was me.’ She sounded too bored to talk about it. ‘And a load of other stuff, too. A few nudges here and there, when the pace of research had slowed down to a pathetic snails-overtaking-on-the-inside crawl. Mostly, though, my part throughout history has been providing the funding. With what I give those useless nerds each year, I could buy South America. And after all that, they’re still lagging way behind. Which is why—’

  ‘Which is why you need me.’

  Nod. ‘Yes, it’s why I need you. Sad, isn’t it? Until they find out the true significance of the anti-clockwise gravitic semiquark - and they haven’t even discovered it yet - all that expensive science is useless, and I’ve got to rely on you. Which is exactly why,’ she added brightly, ‘your prospects with me are so dazzlingly bright. For twenty years, you know you’re completely indispensable to me. If that’s not an invitation to fleece me blind, I don’t know what is.’

  But Duncan wasn’t interested. ‘And it’s not because I can’t be killed—’

  ‘Actually, you can.’ The businesslike voice again. ‘But only by someone or something that’s out of alignment by exactly the same degree that you are: point one of a degree. You’ll be pleased to hear that there’re only two other people on Earth who meet that criterion, and they’re both Buddhist monks living in a monastery in Nepal; so stay clear of the Himalayas and you’re laughing. Apart from them, there’s a washing machine in Tierra del Fuego and a pot-bellied pig somewhere in the Solomon Islands, and that’s it, as far as we know. Nobody and nothing else can kill you.’

  ‘Not even you?’

  ‘Not even me. Yet. In twenty years, mind you—’

  ‘Thanks for the warning.’

  ‘Token of good faith,’ she said airily. ‘My pleasure, glad to have been of service. Of course,’ she added, ‘death’s not everything. For instance, you could be buried twenty feet down in solid rock. You’d still be alive, but after the first ten years you’d probably get a dreadful dose of the fidgets.’

  Duncan grinned. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but if I was buried alive, I’d be no good to you, would I? I wouldn’t be able to do that special thing that only I can do.’

  Click of the tongue, loud and sharp as a ringmaster’s whip. ‘Don’t fanny around, Duncan,’ she said. ‘You know perfectly well what it is, so don’t try pretending you don’t. I was hoping we were on the same wavelength, you and I.’

  ‘All right.’ Duncan closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Tell me if I’ve got this right. You exist because you’re not legally dead—’

  ‘Oh, I’m legally dead,’ she corrected him. ‘But I’m also illegally alive, if you follow me. I was a lawyer once, you know. Well, my father was a lawyer, and I married a lawyer; women weren’t allowed to be lawyers in the sixteenth century, so I did all the work and we had to pretend it was them. I was brilliant, though. Utterly brilliant. Oh, you’re looking at me and giving me that come-off-it look, but it’s true. Never lost a case. All my clients got off. I even,’ she added calmly, ‘got myself off death, on a technicality.’

  Duncan played that back in his mind. Still didn’t make sense. ‘Death?’ he queried weakly. ‘But that’s nothing to do with - I mean, you can’t talk your way out of death. It doesn’t listen.’

  Smuggest grin ever. ‘Listened to me. Everybody listens to me. No, it was a logical progression, from bending man-made law to the laws of nature. That’s what lawyers do, after all. We bend the truth. Just a little heat and pressure at the right place, applied just so, and we change the world. We take a reality in which our client was in the house helping himself to the loose cash and the DVD player into a slightly different reality in which he was down the pub with twenty-seven witnesses. We do it every day; and it’s not lying. It can’t be lying if twelve honest citizens believe it, because what a jury believes is by definition the truth. We change reality. One moment things are one way, the next they’re completely different; and everybody accepts it, so it must be true. Truth is what everybody accepts, it’s the only definition that makes sense. Oh sure, there’re a few dissidents who refuse to fall in with the majority; eyewitnesses who saw the defendant steal the car or beat up the old lady. They won’t accept it when he gets off, but that’s their problem. They’re at variance. Out of phase, just like you.’ She sighed, and smiled. ‘It’s not magic or anything like that, it’s perfectly normal, happens a million times a day all over the world. It’s just that people don’t realise that’s what’s happening. Like people didn’t know about gravity until I nutted Sir Isaac with the apple. Like they don’t yet know about the anticlockwise gravitic semiquark. Yet.’

  Duncan opened his mouth to object, because of course it couldn’t be true. Then he remembered that he was a werewolf. At some point he’d accepted that, and now he believed it. What people accept is the truth.

  ‘Anyhow,’ she went on, ‘the law’s a bit fuzzy on what death really is. You die and your body stops moving, but until all your affairs have been put in order and your bills have been paid and your money’s been shared out and your relatives have all fallen out with each other over who g
ets the ormolu clock in the dining room, you’re still sort of there, what the law calls a legal person. It’s a bit like being a ghost, except of course,’ she added with a broad grin, ‘there’s no such thing as ghosts. As far as the law’s concerned I died years ago, but I don’t actually stop being a person, in the eyes of the law, until my estate’s finally wound up. Till then, I’m kind of betwixt and between: Bowden Allshapes, deceased. And thanks to you—’

  Duncan nodded; he felt strangely grateful to her for saying it aloud. ‘Thanks to me,’ he said, ‘your estate can’t be wound up, because in order for that to happen, the estate accounts need to be drawn up and signed. And that can’t happen, because no matter how many times I add up the figures, they always come out slightly wrong.’

  She beamed at him. ‘In Base Ten, yes. Really,’ she added, ‘I’m stunned you hadn’t realised earlier. All you had to do was calculate the mean error over, say, fifty attempts, and then draw a simple Venn diagram—’

  ‘Bugger Venn diagrams,’ Duncan said forcefully. ‘I keep you alive by not being able to get the accounts to balance. And that’s all—’

  She drew out a thin smile. ‘That’s all,’ she said. ‘Just a small thing, but so’s a six-millimetre Billinghurst reed valve, and you try running a faster-than-light engine without one. Oops,’ she added, ‘not invented yet, on account of Jason Billinghurst is still at school, just about to do his maths GCSE, actually. I’m paying for him to get special coaching. But in eight years’ time—’ She moved a hand in a vague gesture, like a queen trying to wave to cheering crowds with her eyes shut. ‘Like I said,’ she continued, ‘perfectly simple. And you were quite right, by the way. Luke Ferris happened to tell Wesley Loop about that maths homework you did; about how you swore blind you’d checked it all thoroughly but it still came out completely wrong. Don’t ask me how the subject happened to come up. Just making conversation, most probably. And because of it, your life, and Luke’s, and all the other boys in your gang—’