Barking

by Tom Holt

  ‘You can’t let her get me,’ Luke panted, as he tried to get up. ‘It’d be murder.’

  Duncan shrugged. ‘So don’t chase her if you don’t want to.’

  ‘You know bloody well I can’t help it.’

  ‘Same here.’

  Luke sort of tipped himself onto his feet. Duncan picked up the fridge and threw it at him. Either a good aim or a lucky one. Luke stayed still for nearly ten seconds after that.

  ‘Sooner or later, somebody’s going to have to pay for all this damage,’ Duncan said. ‘But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

  Luke went for another charge, but he was clearly tired and maybe a little woozy in the head. Duncan sidestepped, grabbed his arm as he shot by and swung him into the corner of the room. Add a worktop, a corner cupboard and a shelf of mugs to the bill. Oh, and the kettle, which Duncan bounced off Luke’s forehead for good measure.

  ‘Having fun, boys?’

  She was standing in the doorway. But she wasn’t a unicorn. Instead, she was just this gorgeous sophisticated-looking female whose face would slip through the meshes of your mind thirty seconds after you left her. She was holding an old-fashioned wicker shopping basket in her left hand.

  ‘Mr Ferris, isn’t it?’ she said, smiling pleasantly. ‘We have met, though never this close. Oh, in case you think that any second now this room’s going to fill up with vampires I can pretty well guarantee it won’t. I had Carlo - he’s my personal chef - knock up two dozen of his special vegetarian quiches, and I’ve just been round laying them down like landmines. Extremely talented boy, Carlo, though he does tend to be a bit heavy-handed with the garlic. Comes of having no sense of smell, I suppose. Still, you’ve got to make allowances for the disabled, and being dead’s about as disabled as you can get. What happened to her, by the way?’

  ‘Luke murdered her,’ Duncan said evenly. ‘But he meant well.’

  She took a step forward into the kitchen and peered down at Veronica, who was lying perfectly still, on her side. ‘Call me picky if you like,’ she said, ‘but like I told you a while ago, I used to be a lawyer myself, and it’s not actually murder until they die.’ She frowned, then looked up. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I see. That’s why you called for me. You wanted me to—’ She clicked her tongue reproachfully. ‘That’s not very nice, you know. If it was anybody else but you, I might easily have taken offence.’

  Duncan shrugged. ‘Oh well,’ he said.

  Luke, he noticed, was trying to hide behind the wreckage of the fridge. Pathetic. Hard to believe, really, that he, Duncan, had once been in awe of such an obvious loser. What made it worse was that Luke was clearly in no danger from Bowden Allshapes. She wasn’t remotely interested in him: why should she be, after all? Just another overgrown puppy, all bark and no bite. In spite of himself, Duncan felt a little warm glow of pride, and the muscles that would’ve wagged his tail if he’d had one twitched slightly, because she wasn’t here for Luke Ferris, she was here for him. Furthermore, she was going to be disappointed. He didn’t need her after all - why bother with revenge? Being Luke Ferris was plainly the nastiest thing that could happen to anybody, so why try and gild the lily? And by her own admission there wasn’t very much she could do to him. He felt not a trace of an urge to chase after her; all that stuff seemed impossibly remote now - silly, like the sort of thing he used to do at school. The hell with the lot of them, he thought suddenly. There’s nothing left for me here. I might as well just walk away.

  ‘I can save her if you like,’ she said.

  There are moments when life freezes. Everything stops. And you know that when it starts up again, nothing’s going to be the same.

  ‘Just a thought,’ she added. ‘Of course, if you don’t want me to—’

  ‘Can you?’ The words came out like a sandpaper-coated egg out of a chicken. ‘You can’t, you’re bluffing. That’d be—’

  ‘Magic?’ She grinned at him. ‘No such thing. No, I can save her, all right. It’d only take me a jiffy.’

  Duncan looked at her, as though he could peck through her skull with his eyes and see inside her mind. Apparently he couldn’t. Pity. ‘You’re lying,’ he said.

  ‘Try me,’ she said. ‘No win, no fee. Actually, it’s pretty simple.’ She sniffed. ‘Garlic poisoning, right?’

  Duncan nodded.

  ‘There you are, then. She’ll wake up with slightly red eyes and a runny nose but otherwise fully functional and bursting with rude health. And yes, I can do that. I can also cure lycanthropy and vampirism and a whole range of other minor antisocial ailments, as I’d have told you long ago if only you’d asked. Of course,’ she added, ‘there’d have to be something in it for me. A little light clerical work, nothing strenuous. I’d like to say take your time, think it over, but I’m afraid that’s not possible. I figure she’s got, what, twenty-five seconds, and then it’s goodbye, bat girl. Sorry to pressure you, but time is really rather of the essence.’

  Duncan looked down. Veronica wasn’t moving. Choice? It had been so long since he’d really had one.

  ‘You promise you can—?’

  ‘No, of course not. But if I fail, you don’t have to come and work for me. Look, I hate to harp on about it, but time’s getting on.’

  ‘Deal.’

  ‘Duncan, for crying out loud—’ Luke’s head popped up from behind the heap of fridge shrapnel. ‘I don’t know who or what this is; all I know is, she kills the likes of you and me, so if you were thinking—’

  ‘Shut up, Luke,’ Duncan said. ‘Well, get on with it, won’t you?’

  She was grinning at him. ‘It’s done. Look, she’s starting to come round already, bless her.’

  Veronica was yawning and stretching. So that’s what she’ll look like in the mornings, said the lonely, neglected optimist inside Duncan’s head. She mumbled something without consonants in it, and sat up.

  ‘Duncan?’ she said. ‘Oh. Mrs Allshapes. Sorry, do we have an appointment?’

  Then, presumably, Veronica felt the difference. She shuddered all over, as though she was cold, then shuddered again, as though it was murderously hot and she was wearing six layers of jumpers and cardigans.

  ‘That’s just the blood starting to circulate again,’ Bowden Allshapes said cheerfully. ‘Oh, and I wouldn’t try moving your feet for a bit—’

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Because of the pins and needles. But that’s all right, it’ll pass in a minute or two and then you’ll be right as rain. Oh, and before you ask, the heavy palpitations in your chest are just your heartbeat. It probably feels like you’ve swallowed a traction engine, but you won’t even notice it after a while. Well,’ she added frostily, ‘don’t bother to say thank you, will you?’

  Veronica turned her head and looked at Duncan. ‘What happened? ’ she said.

  ‘He killed you,’ Duncan said. ‘Him over there: Luke Ferris. He’s a solicitor. We were at school together.’

  A hand popped up from behind the fridge and did a little wave.

  ‘He poisoned you with garlic,’ Duncan went on. ‘You died. I think. Anyway, Bowden Allshapes brought you back to life.’

  Veronica’s eyes widened like ripples in a pond, and she burst into tears. A tug, like a fish-hook snagged in his soul, made Duncan want to grab her and squeeze her in his arms. He didn’t, though.

  ‘Men,’ said Bowden Allshapes. ‘Sensitive as a horseshoe. Anyway,’ she added briskly, ‘I hate to mention it, but I’ve fulfilled my side of the deal, and paperwork waits for no one. Come along, Duncan. My car’s outside. You can run along behind it if you’d rather.’

  Veronica stopped crying in mid-snuffle. ‘Deal?’ she said sharply.

  ‘None of your business, dear.’ Bowden Allshapes frowned. ‘Well? Are you coming, or not? I know there’s nothing in writing, but I took you for a man of your word.’

  Duncan took a step towards her. Moving his leg was like ripping up a tree stump with a tractor and chain. Veronica looked at him and opened her mou
th, but no words came out.

  ‘Look, this is all very touching and human, but I simply don’t have the time.’ Bowden Allshapes held the door open. ‘What with one thing and another, it’s been rather too long since my last audit, and that’s not good for me. Oh, while I think of it. Mr Ferris.’

  Something moved behind the fridge.

  ‘Would you be awfully sweet,’ said Bowden Allshapes, ‘and have my file couriered round to my office? You’ll find the address on the cover of the file - it’s the registered office of Allshapes Holdings. As soon as possible, please, unless you want me to come round and fetch it myself. We could all go for a nice run while I’m there.’

  ‘Thassalright,’ Luke mumbled very quickly. ‘Seetoitstraight-away. ’

  She smiled. ‘Splendid. Feel free to send in your bill whenever you like. It was a pleasure doing business with you, but on balance I think it’ll be much better having the work done in-house from now on. Though house,’ she added, ‘is something of an understatement. Still, a deal’s a deal. Isn’t it, Duncan?’

  The important thing, he told himself as he walked slowly to the door, is not to look round. For once, he was quite right. He plotted a course across the kitchen floor and out through the door, and stuck to it. There were little pastry things in foil cases lined up on the corridor floor, like the landing lights of an airfield. He followed them, down the corridor to the stairs, down the stairs to the entrance lobby, out into the bitter fresh air. It was still dark, but clouds obscurred the moon.

  ‘I’m right here behind you,’ said Bowden Allshapes, ‘just in case you were thinking of straying off somewhere. Maybe I should get you a collar and lead. There’s the car, look. George will be pleased to see you again, I’m sure. Did you know that he used to be a Formula One racing driver when he was still alive? Not actually a terribly wonderful qualification for a chauffeur, but I guess I’m one of nature’s collectors. No, you get in the front, where I can keep an eye on you. And this time, no sneaky grabbing the wheel and making us crash, that’d just be action adventure. The office, George. Slowly.’

  George was rather a mess - hardly surprising, considering what had happened the last time he and Duncan had met. His face and neck were latticed with deep cuts - no blood, no clots, just empty gouges, which made it worse, somehow - and his left temple was flattened, as if his head was made of putty and someone had trodden on it. He didn’t seem to bear Duncan a grudge, though; he nodded affably as Duncan got in beside him, and then ignored him. It was, of course, a different car. No traffic on the roads at a quarter to five in the morning. Everything calm, peaceful and civilised.

  ‘You’ll enjoy working for us,’ Bowden Allshapes was saying. ‘Light caseload, just the one file to look after. Nice quiet colleagues, you won’t hear a peep out of them from one day’s end to the next. Your office will be on the seventy-third floor, so you’ll have wonderful views out of the window; and accomodation en suite, so to speak. In fact, you can have the whole floor to yourself. Just you, the file, and a pencil. No calculators or anything like that, I’m afraid, but it’ll be pleasantly soothing, just adding up the same columns of figures over and over and over again. A refreshing change, I’d imagine, after all the dashing about you’ve been doing lately. The best part, though, has got to be the job security. At Allshapes, we don’t just think in terms of a job for life, it’s a job for ever. Though, as I said earlier, we may need to review the position in about twenty years. Still, for someone with your rather unique profile, I’m sure we’ll be able to find you something that’ll keep you out of mischief. Ah, here we are.’

  Out of the car, in through a glass and steel entrance lobby, into a lift that just kept on going up and up. The three of them: Bowden Allshapes, George and himself. The lift stopped at the thirty-sixth floor and George got out. ‘Maintenance,’ Bowden Allshapes explained. ‘Next time you see him, he’ll be good as new again, if you don’t look too closely. We’re very organised here. The only way to be, if you ask me.’

  Duncan glanced up at the level indicator; fifty-first floor and still climbing. This high up, of course, all the windows would be sealed. You don’t have to be dead to work here, but by God it helps.

  ‘There’s no staff canteen,’ she was telling him, ‘not as such. Mostly because nobody who works here needs to eat. But that’s all right, we’ll send out for sandwiches and pizzas and things for you. If you’re very good, maybe we can think about letting you out on the roof for a run about at full moon. I like to think of myself as an enlightened employer, you see. As far as I’m concerned, investing in people is much more than just a nifty slogan. I think it was the late Richard Nixon who said that once you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. Here we are, top floor. I think you’re going to like your new office. A bit spartan, but loads and loads of room.’

  She was right about that. In an area the size of a football pitch, there was one plastic stackable-type chair and one plain wooden table. On the table was a coffee mug full of pencils. Bare floorboards. Nothing else. One very small window, like an arrow slit. Only one door, apart from the lift entrance; it led into another huge room, in the precise centre of which stood a steel-framed bed, the sort you’d expect to find in an army barracks. A chamber pot lurked under it. No window. Home.

  ‘Everybody else in this building is dead, apart from you and me,’ Bowden Allshapes said. ‘So efficient. No need to bother with all the tiresome, disruptive stuff that people feel the need for.’ She smiled. She’d be rather attractive if she wasn’t the epitome of evil. ‘Now I expect you’ve been under the impression that my dead people aren’t really dead at all; they died, and then somehow they were brought back to life, like you were when you bashed your head on that water pipe. Actually, it’s not like that at all. The legal definition of dead, as I’m sure you remember from law school, is no brain activity. Well. If you were to hook one of my boys up to a fancy medical scanning thing, the needle wouldn’t so much as twitch. What’s that expression: the lights are on but nobody’s home? That’s the way I like ’em, Duncan Hughes. They don’t need a brain to tell their bodies what to do. That’s my job. It means I’ve got thousands and thousands of ideal employees: absolute efficiency and no aggravation. One day,’ she added with pride, ‘the entire workforce will be like this. I don’t know what they’ll find for the living people to do. I’m not a politician, it’s not my business. Really, I’m just doing what every employer in the world wishes he could do; and one of these days I’ll make that dream come true, you mark my words. It’s inevitable, if we’re going to see off the competition from the emerging economies of the Far East, with their minimal labour costs. It won’t be long before they elect a government that’ll see it the way I do, and then I won’t have to bother with all this silly skulking around any more. Well,’ she added briskly, ‘it’s great fun talking to you and getting to know you, but I haven’t got time right now. Go and sit in the chair, and as soon as your friend Luke Ferris sends the file round you can start work. You know what to do: just keep on adding up the figures, and when they don’t balance, start all over again. You get twenty minutes for lunch, the lights go out at midnight and come back on again at six a.m. I’ll drop by every six months or so to see how you’re getting on. Welcome to the firm, Duncan. It’s a pleasure having you with us.’

  A chair. A table. A pencil.

  What she hadn’t told Duncan was that there was an automatic door-closing mechanism and a time lock on the bedroom door. It opened when the lights went out in the office, and closed again as soon as he’d walked through it; reverse procedure when the lights came on again in the morning. During the third cycle (you couldn’t really call them days and nights; it’d be like saying Swindon was the Cotswolds) he tried staying in the office after lights-out. Nothing bad happened, but he had to sleep in the chair instead of the marginally more comfortable bed. A certain degree of rebellion, he realised, had been allowed for in the specification.

  The numbers, he noticed after
a while, changed from time to time; at least, they shifted their positions on the page, though the actual figures stayed the same. As an experiment, he copied them all out on the floorboards and checked them the next day. It proved his theory, for what that was worth, but he couldn’t think of any use to put his hard-earned discovery to. If he put the pencil down and refused to add, the lights went out and it got very cold very quickly. He held out for two complete cycles once, but the satisfaction he got out of it wasn’t enough to justify being frozen to the bone, so he gave in and went back to work.

  Twice every cycle the lift doors opened (there were no controls on his side of the door, naturally) and a dead girl came in with a tray. The first time he said ‘Thank you’ out of sheer force of habit. The second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh time, he tried talking to her, but she didn’t reply. The eighth time, he smashed the chair over her head; it made her drop the tray, and he had to stand up for the rest of the shift. Next lights-on, when he emerged from the bedroom, there was another chair in its place, identical in every respect.

  After a bit, Duncan stopped bothering to count the cycles. He was only reminded of the passage of time when he came to work and found that his arrow-slit window had been blocked up - shuttered, it turned out, from the outside. The shutter went away again three cycles later, and he eventually figured out that it had been there to keep moonlight from getting into the office. When the shutter was taken away again he didn’t bother looking out of the window. The view only upset him, and as time went on he took to sitting facing the other way, so that his back was to it. No measures were taken to stop him, so apparently it was allowed. Jolly good.

  His main regret was that he hadn’t paid attention to maths lessons at school. If he had, he might have been able to work out how to adjust his calculations so as to convert the result into Base Ten, compensating for the point-one degree of error. He spent many hours trying to reinvent that particular wheel, until the flip side of every sheet of paper in the file was covered in little scribbled sums and he was forced (in the absence of a rubber) to start using the floor and the walls to write on. He couldn’t do it, though. He knew it could be done, but he lacked the necessary flair for figures, simple as that. The Management didn’t even erase his jottings from the walls while he was asleep, which suggested that they shared his opinion of his mathematical abilities. After a while he gave that up as well. He was rapidly approaching the point where anything not enforced and compulsory was simply too much effort. The worst thing about it was how little he found he was suffering, once he’d settled in and found his feet. He was getting used to it, more or less the same way he’d got used to working at Craven Ettins; and here, he didn’t have regular appointments with Jenny Sidmouth to contend with, so in a way it was better—