by Tom Holt
The implication being that the time had now come. Which it had; no question about that. Jack Tedesci had been the first of many business associates past and present baying for his blood because the slab of real estate they’d bought from him had suddenly vanished. Going on was out of the question. He reached in his pocket, got out his phone and accessed his bank account. $100,036.72. Not quite, then. He still had $36.72 of time left, then, which came as a relief. If he spent it carefully it could buy him a couple of days. Long enough, anyhow, for a cup of coffee. He went to the staff kitchen, filled the kettle and switched it on, then remembered that the electricity had been cut off.
He sighed. There were still four ginger nuts in the biscuit jar. He ate them, washing them down with water. He looked around, remembering when this room had been filled with people at all times – people making themselves drinks, drinking them, chatting, doing faces and nails, getting changed ready for a night out, storing shopping in the fridge, reading magazines when they should have been at their desks working. He’d come a long way from the Caucasus but, geographical irrelevances excluded, he was right back where he started – because infinity is curved, he supposed, and according to Stan Gogerty I’m just an egg inside an egg inside a chicken, so what would I know anyhow?
It was all the brass ring’s fault – easy enough to say when it wasn’t here to defend itself. He thought about that thought and decided that you can take fair-mindedness too far. It hadn’t ever actually talked to him in a creepy Joan-of-Arc sort of way, but he’d been keenly aware of it in his mind, as a personality – a reminder of his origins, he liked to fool himself, but more than that. You could do this, it would urge, you could do that. And this and that had turned out to involve using the M stuff: folding the space/time continuum like those cut-out paper-dolls-holding-hands, so that he could sell the same plots of land over and over again; hiring a dozen people to sit behind one desk simultaneously, in a reality layered like filo pastry. How malleable he’d been, how easily led. You could do this and that. Eat the nice apple, said the brass serpent with its tail in its mouth; it’ll do you good.
What did I know? he asked himself. I’m just a poor orphan boy from the Caucasus. A brass ring tells me to fold space/time; I do it. Rude not to. And now the brass ring had gone, left him alone to clear up the mess and put everything back where he’d got it from – moved on, presumably, to a more efficient and satisfactory carrier. He walked slowly back to the front office, where, on the Reception desk, he saw a letter. He was fairly sure it hadn’t been there before, but he could have been mistaken.
“Dear sir,” the letter said, “please find enclosed our invoice for powdered coffee supplied to your goodselves between the following dates.” He translated from sterling into US dollars. $36.72.
All right then.
He wrote out a cheque, put it in an envelope, stamped it with his last stamp, found nesting in the back of his wallet, where he also found a five-pound note and some loose change: seventy-two pence. “Goodbye, office,” he said aloud, and walked down into the street, where a taxi happened to be waiting.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“A fiver’s worth,” Mr Huos replied. “Wherever that takes me, that’s the place.”
The driver looked at him. “Quicker to walk,” he said.
Mr Huos scowled at him. “Here’s five pounds,” he said. “Here’s the tip.” He dropped the coins through the open window. “Now fucking drive.”
The driver looked at him again, and there was a split second when he seemed to understand. He nodded, and Mr Huos got in and sat down.
They drove for a very long time. Westway to the M40, past Oxford and Warwick, the M42 to join the M5, leaving at the Kidderminster junction, and cross-country from there.
“Are we nearly there yet?” Mr Huos asked.
He glanced at his watch, according to which the journey had lasted three minutes. Outside the window, hedgerows and green fields blurred past, with a background of big round hills. WELCOME TO ELGAR COUNTRY, shouted a road sign. Mr Huos didn’t know who Elgar was ( Wasn’t that the name of the famous race horse that got stolen?) but he had the strangest feeling of familiarity, of homecoming. Which was odd, since he’d never been here before in his life.
As far as he knew. Ha!
Down little lanes with grass growing up the middle. Three and a half minutes now. The sun agreed with his watch. It showed no inclination to set, but instead shone brightly in the spaces between flat, squashed-looking clouds. A cottage or two. A church. The taxi stopped.
“We’re here,” the driver said.
Mr Huos nodded, and opened the door. Grass under his feet, at his side the yellow stone of the churchyard wall. “Where the hell are we?” he asked.
“Norton St Edgar,” the driver replied, and drove away.
“Fine,” Mr Huos shouted at the rear of the disappearing taxi. “I can walk the rest of the way from here.” Marvellous. He didn’t like walking at the best of times, and his shoes were too tight. He looked down and realised he’d just trodden in something bucolic.
Well, he thought, so this is Norton St Edgar. Nice place; no wonder so many people were so keen to live here. Wiping his shoe carefully on a tuft of grass, he considered the view. Pretty, he decided. Nice hills and stuff. Really, it’d be a shame to build houses all over it.
Apparently, though, that hadn’t happened. The magic of the plain brass ring, which had folded the universe for him and kept it folded after he’d taken the money and moved on, had all faded now. He wondered where all the houses had gone to, and the people living in them. If he’d understood what Stan Gogerty had said in the learned journal, each house he’d built was basically an egg floating anomalously in time and space. In which case, they ought to start hatching any moment now. That wasn’t a cheerful thought, and he threw it out of his mind like a bouncer ejecting a drunk, but it came back almost immediately and brought a load of its rowdy friends along with it. Exactly what had happened to all those people? If, as he’d always assumed, the magic had been keeping them in place, and the magic had stopped working, what then? He realised he had no idea. Appalling. He felt his forehead and realised he was sweating, as well he might. All those people—
He felt in his pocket and found something, a coin, snuggled in a fold of his hanky. He took it out and looked at it. One penny. He laughed. Not quite yet then.
He turned his head like a battleship’s gun turret and took a proper look at the landscape. Once he’d reduced it to an Ordnance Survey two-dimensional shape – contour lines and salient features – it was entirely familiar. It ought to be; he’d divided it up and parcelled it out into lots often enough. He couldn’t begin to remember the names of all the streets he’d built on that shape over the years, dozens of them, maybe a hundred. He grinned like a dog. A town, practically a city, but nothing to see; nothing an archaeologist could sink a trowel into.
That reminded him. He’d seen a telly programme once about archaeology, with the little scruffy man from Blackadder scampering energetically in the mud. Cities, he remembered, tend to come in layers, like a Big Mac. Take a really old city; it’s made up of loads of different layers, where each generation has built on top of the ruins of its predecessors. Dig a vertical shaft and you can see them, like strata in rock: dozens of streets, maybe a hundred, all piled on top of each other, all occupying the same ground but separated by time. Seen from above, from the air, just one. Seen from the side, lots. On a map, or a development plan, or the plan attached to a transfer deed, you only got the bird’s-eye view. What he’d done was essentially the same thing time did, except accelerated. He frowned and scratched an itch behind his ear. He had an idea he’d hit on something, a stray fragment of the explanation, but he knew he wasn’t capable of recognising it for what it was. Stan Gogerty would get it; he’d know what it meant, but of course he wasn’t here.
He shook his head. One moment a load of eggs floating in space, the next a slice of layer cake. Given human beings’ innate need t
o think in metaphors, it was remarkable they’d contrived to achieve anything at all.
All those poor people trapped in collapsed archaeological strata, like earthquake victims. In Baldrick’s ruined city, as previously noted, the superimposed levels were kept apart by time. Here, it had been magic, some trick or other powered by the brass ring, which strongly implied that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t dig the poor buggers out again.
My fault, he thought.
Once, at an airport, waiting for a plane, he’d bought a copy of Dr Faustus. It had been an honest mistake (he’d thought it was the book of that film with Omar Sharif and the famous shot where he opens the cattle-truck door), and by the time he realised what he’d done, he was twenty thousand feet above the Atlantic. So he’d read it, and pretty weird it turned out to be. There was a scene at the end where the hero’s waiting for the Devil to come and get him, and this had stuck in his mind, like a bit of sweetcorn skin lodged between the front teeth.
Ah Faustus! Thou hast one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned eternally –
One hour, one penny. He opened his hand and looked at it. The Queen was on the back, but she looked away, unwilling to meet the eye of the man responsible for hundreds of innocent people getting buried alive in metaphysical choux pastry. He considered repenting, but that had never been his style. To hell with it, he thought, and chucked the penny into the hedge. Then he waited for something to happen.
He waited and waited, and then he felt something tapping on the toe of his left shoe. He looked down, and there was a chicken, pecking at the stitching of his hand-made Lobb-of-St-James’s brown brogues. Very gently, he nudged it away. “Go on, chicken,” he said. “Shoo.”
The chicken took no notice. Peck, peck, peck. Not that it mattered any more, but each precision-aimed beakstrike was taking about a fiver off the value of his footwear.
A lesser man would have swung his leg back and booted the chicken into Worcestershire, but Mr Huos restrained himself. Far from holding the moral high ground, he was down on the moral flood plain, cricking his neck back to see the encircling peaks. He withdrew his foot gently out of pecking range, in the process taking a step back. The chicken set to work on his right foot. He sighed and gave ground once again. The chicken advanced. He retreated. It was silly – a former master of the universe being backed into a hedge by a barnyard fowl – but he accepted it with patient resignation, as befitted a man without a penny to his name. Only when his back was to the hazel branches and the bramble tendrils were nuzzling his collar did he stop and hold his ground.
“Fine,” he said. “Eat my shoes, see if I care.”
The chicken took one last peck, lifted its head, twitched it the way chickens do. “I’ve got a message for you,” it said.
Oh hell, he thought, now I’m listening to talking chickens. And then he paused and thought about it. He reflected on how he’d always been able to understand any language, just hearing the words, not realising he was being talked to in foreign until the matter emerged from context. Human languages, animal languages; he’d never been conscious of understanding birdsong and beast-grunt before, but maybe that was just because he hadn’t been listening. The mind blots out the voices it can’t be bothered with, the background chatter, the involuntary eavesdrops. Maybe, when he’d strolled in the park or down the street, some of those voices hadn’t been strictly human.
“Chicken?” he said.
“My name,” the chicken replied icily, “is Mary Byron. I have a message for you from Stanley Gogerty.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Looking glasses and wardrobes, his childhood reading had prepared him for those, but fridges and toilets? Appropriate, in a way. There’s something mysterious and wonderful about a mirror, and at least a big old-fashioned mahogany wardrobe has class. For the Don Mayers of this world, he thought sadly, a knackered fridge is far more suitable. And a toilet, as it were, speaks for itself.
He tried the door again but it wasn’t going to budge, just like the shop door, with its hammer-proof glass. A pattern emerging, he decided. All right then. Slowly and deliberately, he turned round to face the weirdness and concluded that on balance it wasn’t so bad. Green fields, blue sky, distant sheep on distant hills, a Tory’s vision of England. Fine, he said to himself, bring it on.
Maybe he’d have felt differently if it wasn’t for the guilt, because there was no denying, it served him right. He’d sent away his annoying upstairs neighbour, and now here he was, presumably and for all he knew in the same place as his victim: poetic justice, although the poetry element was about on a level with the stuff you find written inside greetings cards. Was that stone building away yonder a ruined abbey? Practically inevitable, he decided, in the circumstances.
Being urban to the core, he drifted towards the only building in sight. Fallen-down and dilapidated it might be, but at least it had walls and the suggestion of a roof, so if it rained (he’d been on holiday to the countryside when he was young; sooner or later, it always rains in the country) he wouldn’t get wet. Besides, he was pretty sure that he hadn’t ended up here entirely at random. Someone had set an agenda, and it seemed more likely that it would be taking place in the only building for miles around than out in all this green vagueness. Get it over with, he told himself, and then maybe they’ll let you go home. Maybe.
The ruin was further away than it had looked from the toilet door, and it took him a while to get there. Apart from the far-away sheep (and they could just as easily have been white splodges on a painted backdrop) he was the only living thing as far as the eye could see. No birds overhead, no rabbits flolloping through the long grass, no flies, midges, wasps. For someone used to sharing his horizons with a teeming mass of life, it was distinctly uncomfortable. Artificial, he thought. The designer could do vegetation, but the budget wouldn’t stretch to extras from the animal kingdom. He quickened his pace, his instincts urging him to get to the cover of the building as soon as possible. Daft, but that’s atavistic tendencies for you.
Sure enough, it was a ruined abbey. There was the gatehouse, and that was where the monks slept, and that big long job must be the church. In spite of himself he grinned. To whoever was doing this to him, ruined abbeys presumably meant Gothic melodrama, but to him they would always mean August afternoons when it was too wet for the beach, followed by a picnic in the car, with steamed-up windows and tea in the top of a Thermos, Mum and Dad gently bickering and Polly in one of her sulks. There was something so reassuringly mundane and boring about derelict ecclesiastical architecture, it was almost like coming home. No; if whoever it was had wanted to do heavy menace, he should have gone for a city-centre car park at 3 a.m. This was so tame it was practically National Trust.
Something moved. He stopped dead until he was able to identify it: a horse, a fellow life form at last. Not that Don was comfortable around horses. When Polly was going through her brief mad-about-ponies phase, he’d had to go to riding stables and gymkhanas, where huge looming things with hooves and teeth had eyed him up as a potential target. This horse wasn’t like them, though. It had its saddle on and bits of string attached to its face, but it was quietly swishing its tail and munching grass, no bother to anyone. Maybe they only get stroppy and mad-eyed when they’re being chivvied by people’s sisters. In which case, he felt their pain.
“Nice horse,” he said.
The horse looked at him. He shrugged and walked on past it until he reached the church wall, where there was a door, a big grey oak door, studded with nails, slightly ajar. He felt like a character in a computer game.
Very gently, using only the tips of his index and middle fingers, he pushed the door until it swung open. I don’t want to go in there, he said to himself. Like you’ve got a choice, himself pointed out. He felt rather as he’d done when he was eight or nine years old and he had to go to someone’s birthday party, knowing he was only there because everybody in the class had been invited. He paused
on the threshold, hearing his mother’s voice saying, “You’ll enjoy it when you get there,” which had never turned out to be the case. Oh well, he thought, and went inside.
There were several seconds before he could see anything in the comparative darkness. It was just a church, though it turned out to have rather more roof than he’d expected. He grinned. Continuity error. It made him feel a little better, though not much.
Movement in the shadows made him tense up, until it resolved itself into a bald man in a brown dressing gown, or rather a monk, who beckoned to him without smiling, turned his back and walked up the aisle towards the altar. For some reason he wasn’t a bit scared, maybe because fear comes from the unknown, and this wasn’t. The elaborate mise en scène, with its painstaking attention to detail and beautifully observed touches of realism, told him everything he needed to know. It was all too perfect, too complete. The gargoyles and misericords and the polished brass of the eagle lectern and the worn brasses let into the flagstones and the deep glow of the bottom-polished oak pews was too perfectly lit, too sharply in focus. He’d been to real ruined abbeys and they weren’t like this, not nearly so convincing and realistic. The unseen director was trying too hard, and that was a great comfort.
The monk arrived at the altar steps, bowed deeply and withdrew discreetly into the shadows precisely as a ray of sunlight burst through the technicolour filter of a stained-glass window. It fell on the altar, spotlighting two crisply defined objects: a chicken and an egg.
Then a great voice, welling up all around him like background noise massively amplified, boomed out and filled all the available space. “Well?” it said.
“Trevor,” said his wife, peering through a gap in the lace curtains, “there’s two knights in the front garden.”
Trevor McPherson frowned. “Two whats?”
“Knights,” Pam replied. “You know, in armour.”
