Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages

by Tom Holt

  (Oh God, he thought, what’ve I done now?)

  “You come bursting in here and you tell me magic’s for real and you can do it, and all the stuff that’s been happening to me’s – well, I still can’t explain it, but maybe it could make sense, if only we knew. And you stand there drivelling about bloody darts. The whole world’s changed for ever, and you aren’t even interested.”

  “It’s not a toy,” he retorted. “It’s not natural and it’s dangerous and I want it to go away, but first I’ve got to try and save that poor bugger I vanished into thin air. After that –” he shook his head “– if we manage to get out of this in one piece, I’m going to forget all about it, and you’re never ever going to mention it again, understood? Not one word. All right?”

  But she frowned at him. “Don, that’s stupid,” she said. “It’s like using a winning lottery ticket to start a bonfire with. It’s—” She stopped and looked at him. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “I think so, yes. And I don’t think it’s just me, either. I mean, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you’ve had all this weird stuff happening to you at the same time as – well, that stuff. You know what?” He shook his head. “I think we’re two hobbits caught up in someone’s billion-dollar movie, and any minute now a huge army of horrible goblins is going to come charging over the hill straight at us. Which means,” he added briskly, “it’d probably be sensible if we started running now, rather than waiting for the cameras and the lights. Only we don’t know which way to run.”

  She looked at him. “How’d it be if we asked someone?” she said.

  He blinked. “Who did you have in mind?”

  “How about Mr Huos?” she said.

  “Your boss? Why?”

  “Something he said,” she replied. “Or at least, the way he said it – when he came in my room and said there’d be a load of crazy phone calls but not to worry. It’s like…” She thought for a moment. “It’s like he knew what was going on. He knew there’d be people ringing in talking about vanishing houses and stuff like that, so doesn’t it stand to reason he knows about the –​ well, magic and all that? I don’t know, maybe he’s the cause of it all. I mean, it’s his firm; he must know what’s going on.”

  “You think he’s been drinking your coffee?”

  She thought about that too. “No, why should he? He owns the bloody coffee. And I don’t think he wrote in my diary, either. I think I did that. Only—”

  “All right,” Don said quickly. “Let’s not go there quite yet. About what you said.” He sighed. “I don’t like it. We’ve got no idea what all this is about. We can’t go trusting someone just because he might be able to explain it to us. I mean, explaining’s what the villain does in a Bond movie when he’s about to blow up the world.”

  Polly had a sudden mental image of Mr Huos with a fluffy white cat on his lap, but it didn’t look right at all. Not a cat person, in her opinion. “He seems all right to me. OK, I’ve only met him twice, but—”

  “If he’s mixed up with this magic stuff, I don’t imagine he’s very nice,” Don said harshly. “Do you think he makes people disappear too? Well, come on. If he disappears houses, then why not?”

  Oh, she thought. “You reckon he… But why’d he do that?” she countered. “He built the houses; why’d he want to get rid of them? Quite apart from everything else, he’d lose millions of pounds. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Yes, but we don’t know.” He shrugged. “I guess that’s what’s bugging me the most, not knowing. I’m not used to it.” He stood up (carefully this time, sliding himself out from under the table like a letter from an envelope). “All my life – well, you know me. Technology. Gadgets. When I was five years old, I was the only one who could get the timer on the video to work. And it was because I did what nobody else was prepared to do. I read the manual.” He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed in deeply. “I didn’t try and do it by light of nature, intuition or divine revelation. I read the book and followed the instructions and, guess what? I made it work.” He covered his face with his hands, then ran his fingers through his hair. “You can’t imagine the feeling of power something like that gives you. Control. The ability to make things work when nobody else can. And all because there was always a book or a Read Me or a leaflet or a photocopied sheet. That was the basis of my entire world. It made sense. I can say, ‘Use of unauthorised components will void the manufacturer’s warranty,’ in sixteen languages.” He turned to face the wall. “And now there’s this new gadget, quite possibly a gadget of infinite power for good or evil that could change the life of everybody on the planet for ever, and there’s no fucking handbook.” He paused, breathed in deeply. “Well, actually, there is. But it’s written in a language nobody can understand. Actually, that’s not strictly true. There’s a photograph of me when I’m six that can understand it, but he’s me when I’m six, so he’s no bloody help at all. And finally, when I persuade me to look it up and read me what it says, what do I get? I can send people away, but I can’t bring them back. God, that’s frustrating.”

  She gave him a moment, then asked, “Are you feeling better now?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  He turned away from the wall and looked at her. “But I’ve made my mind up,” he said. “First, I’m going to get that bloody guitar player back.”

  “But the book says—”

  “Screw the book,” Don snapped viciously. “I’m through with the fucking book. You know what? The rest of you were right all along. We don’t need the book; it’s useless. We’ll figure it out for ourselves. And then,” he added, “as soon as we’ve put things right, that bloody pencil sharpener’s going somewhere it can’t do anybody any harm, ever again.”

  He was falling.

  He was falling upwards, which was a novelty. He was being acted upon by a perversely different kind of gravity, one that shot you up instead of down. Not weightlessness, where you just drift, and if you throw up it follows you slowly round the room like a spaniel. It was your actual falling – the headlong out-of-control tumbling, the rush of the slipstream, the inexorable drag, thirty-two feet per second per second incremental velocity – just up, that was all.

  He had a feeling it wasn’t going to end well. Falling down rarely results in a pleasing outcome, and from what he’d gathered so far, there was no reason to assume that falling up would be much better. Maybe he’d burn up in the atmosphere rather than splat on the ground, but it hardly mattered. Any moment now, he was going to…

  Once upon a time he was seventeen, just got his first motorbike – precisioneered alloy frame, carbon fibre super- aerodynamic fairing and a teeny little engine that sounded like a bumblebee on heat. Going flat out down a quiet suburban street, needle jammed right up to thirty-six miles per hour, and some poo-for-brains woman in a Fiesta had come out of a side turning without looking. Wham, straight into the side of her, and he’d taken off, the human cannonball, flying through the air without benefit of aircraft. As it turned out he landed in a newly dug flower bed and came out of it without a scratch, but while he was flying, Death looming over him, scythe, eye sockets, the full English, all he’d been able to think was, Oh well. That was it. No panic. No loosening of the bladder, no excruciating muscle cramps, no screams. Total absence of his life flashing before his eyes. Oh well, and then thud into the bedding plants.

  It was the same now, except that the first time he’d been airborne for maybe a second and a half, and now he’d been falling for ages. Ironic; he’d always fancied having a go at skydiving – free-falling with his arms and legs outstretched, watching the flat earth spinning like old-fashioned vinyl on a turntable. But all he could see was…

  Light. A big shiny cloudy doughnut of light, into which he was falling upwards. As the air slapped his face and scoured his eyeballs dry, he thought, This isn’t right. This is silly.

  Particularly so in context. The last thing he could remember before falling was
putting down his guitar, stomping down the stairs and giving that little turd in the flat below a piece of his mind about the…

  Odd. Maybe there was a piece missing, because it was hard to join up the dots of cause and effect. Anti-gravity sucking furiously on his toes, he cast his mind further back in search of some kind of explanation. An average day at the office, answering calls, doing paperwork. Meeting friends in the pub later, but enough time in hand before he had to leave for half an hour trying to straighten out the tricky chords in “Stairway to Heaven.” And that was all, really. Nothing there that should have led him to anti-tumble, the wrong way up nature’s most inviolable one-way street, to a messy and premature death.

  The injustice of it surged inside him like heartburn. It was wrong. It wasn’t on. He had a good mind to send someone a really nasty e-mail about it, except he never would, because any moment now he’d be blotted out like a bug on a windscreen. Bitch.

  Oh well, he thought.

  And landed.

  Really soft landing. Two months ago he and a bunch of friends had flown out to the Greek islands, and coming in to land the aircraft had gone hoppity-skippety-jump down the runway, but now, one moment he was all movement in every plane, the next he was standing perfectly still, on one leg, on straw.

  Oh, he thought. Not dead. Jolly good.

  On straw, though. He looked down at his feet, then up, sideways. Then down again. His feet.

  Not his feet, though. Where his feet should have been, due south of his body at the end of his legs, all he could see was a pair of claws. Scaly, avian, three toes ending in bloody great spikes. Also, not quite as important as the feet/claws issue but probably significant, it wasn’t straw, it was long yellow tubes the length and thickness of scaffold poles. Looked like straw, hence the initial confusion, but wasn’t. Too big, even for GM.

  He considered that analytically. By rights, he oughtn’t to be able to stand upright on a stack of bloody great big yellow poles, not with human feet encased in stylish designer trainers. It’d be a different matter entirely if you had claws (say). Also, the building he was in: great big wooden structure, size and scale of a major railway terminus but built from planks. It was almost as if…

  I’m in a chicken shed, he thought. And I’m a chicken.

  One of those flashes of insight, the sort you’re far better off without, but they do have the nasty habit of being right. But, hang on, I’m not a fucking chicken. I know precisely what I am. I’m a thirty-year-old loss adjuster working for Amalgamated General Mutual, and on each foot I have five toes. Five, not three. Five. Five.

  A shadow passed over him and he knew he wasn’t alone. He was about to turn his head but realised he didn’t need to; his field of vision had expanded enormously (almost as though he had eyes on the sides of his head, rather than in front athwart his nose), and he could plainly see the huge, enormous, massive chicken who’d just hopped in through the square opening in the far wall.

  Quite possibly the biggest bipedal life form he’d ever encountered: a feathered mountain, its apex a luxuriously crested head with two mad, staring round eyes and a beak like a bale spike, the whole monstrous thing supported by two scaly grey legs culminating in two triple-toed claws, with another gut-​scrambling spike sticking out of the back of each ankle at ninety degrees.

  Not a lady chicken, he guessed. A gentleman chicken.

  He didn’t know all that much about poultry, but he did remember hearing about the holiday some of his friends had been on in Thailand or somewhere out that way, where cock fighting was still a thriving spectator sport. Essentially, you put two gentlemen chickens together in a closed space, and immediately they went for each other with razor beak and pitiless spur, not stopping until at least one of them was a bloody mess of broken bone and feather. Pure instinct, apparently. If two cock birds meet, alternative dispute resolution isn’t an option.

  “You looking at me?” growled the cock.

  This time, it was worth noting, he didn’t think, Oh well. This time he ran through the entire repertoire of conventional terror symptoms, from trembling and heart-pounding to loosened bowels and clogged windpipe. The prospect of hitting a solid surface at high speed had been depressing, but he hadn’t really felt frightened. Clearly, when death was to be accompanied by extreme violence, a different set of instincts cut in: adrenalin (he hoped) and also the fear-based products. Scared; he was petrified. A coward. Chicken. A poultroon.

  “Me?” he heard himself cluck. “Gosh, no.”

  “I said, you looking at me?” the cock growled softly (and the collar of feathers round his neck started to rise).

  “No, I’m not. Really.”

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “Absolutely not,” he clucked back, unable to take his eyes off the ankle spurs. “What I should’ve said was, yes, I was looking at you and I realise how very wrong of me that was and I apologise and it absolutely won’t happen again, I promise faithfully, only please don’t…”

  One hubcap-sized perfectly round eye was scanning him, reiterating the male chicken’s prime directive. There was going to be a fight any second – well, you wouldn’t call it a fight, more of an execution – and pretty soon he’d be dead, so really there wasn’t much point in idly speculating how he’d got there, or why he’d apparently Sam Becketted into a chicken. A waste of what little precious time he had left.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  The cock, who’d been edging forward, tense as a coiled spring, stopped. “You talking to me?”

  He nodded. “Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I was wondering. You wouldn’t happen to have any idea how I got here, would you?”

  “You what?”

  “Only,” he continued quickly, “it’s all a bit odd and, I don’t know, I just feel it’d be such a shame if I died not knowing the truth, so I thought, it can’t do any harm if I just ask, on the off chance.”

  The cock was motionless, as though its feet were glued down. Clearly something new and disturbing was happening inside its tiny little brain, something so far beyond the scope of its inherent programming that it had no idea how to cope. “You what?” it repeated.

  “I only just arrived, you see,” he said. “A moment ago I was somewhere else – actually, more to the point, I was something else. A human. And then I was falling, only up rather than down, and then I was here and you showed up, and there’s got to be some sort of rational explanation, and since you’re from around here – at least I assume you are – I figured that maybe you could tell me before you peck me to death. If it’s no bother, I mean.”

  The cock stared at him for a long time. “You what?” it said.

  Like that, is it? Scheherazade with feathers. Well, he was game, no pun intended. “For a start,” he went on, “am I actually a chicken, or am I a human being who thinks he’s a chicken, or is there a third possibility I haven’t even considered yet? Maybe this is all a dream, though it doesn’t feel like one, because for one thing if this was a dream I’d be arriving late for a project tactics meeting and I wouldn’t have any clothes on, though now I come to think of it, I haven’t got any clothes on, just feathers. How about you? Are you real, or just dreaming that you’re real when in fact you’re a figment of my imagination?”

  “Urrk,” replied the cock. Then its head went sharply down, and it pecked up a grain of corn the size of a goose egg. As far as it was concerned, he apparently no longer existed. Too difficult, evidently.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and sidled past–out through the hole in the wall, mind the step, and suddenly he was under a broad blue sky, bathed in glorious sunshine and surrounded by a bevy of lady chickens. Hens.

  Cor, he thought.

  And then, what did I just think?

  A hen looked up from pecking in the dust and peered at him dubiously. He looked back; he couldn’t help it.

  (A chicken, for God’s sake. You’ve got to stop this immediately, or…)

  “Hi,” he heard himself say.


  He always said “Hi” under such circumstances. “Hello” never worked for him; it tended to come out like meeting the panel at a job interview, or a politician kissing babies, or Leslie Phillips. He’d flirted briefly with “Hiya” and “Hi there,” but there wasn’t an atom of romance in either of them. “Hi,” on the other hand, was a skill he’d gradually mastered (like woodturning, or playing the violin), and he flattered himself that he wasn’t bad at it.

  “You’re not from round here,” said the hen.

  As a feed line it was unexceptional. It left him a lot of work to do, but it had possibilities. “That’s right,” he said, “I’m from out of town.”

  He stopped. It was hard to be certain, because the words had come out simultaneously, but he could’ve sworn that instead of “town” he’d said “coop.” But that was impossible. So he tried it again. Town, he said.

  “Coop.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. I mean, yes.”

  The hen twitched her head, a routine preprogrammed quick-look-round to make sure no foxes had crept up on her in the five seconds since she last looked. “Does Boris know you’re here?”

  That didn’t just not make sense, it made the opposite of sense, anti-sense. Then intuition kicked in and told him Boris must be the cock. “Oh yes,” he said, and caught himself adding, “I sorted him out all right.”

  The fixed stare in the hen’s lentil eye seemed to soften just a little. “You did, did you?”

  “Let’s say we both know where we stand.”

  The hen’s neck darted down, and she gobbled up a stray layers’ pellet. “You don’t look like you’ve been fighting.”

  He tried to grin, but you can’t, with a beak. “Oh, it didn’t come to that,” he replied. “I don’t believe in pointless violence.”

  “Pointless.” The hen did the twitch again, and he realised he’d just done the same thing, without realising. “You mean, like blunt.”