by Tom Holt
“You know,” Mr Huos said wistfully. “If a fox were to get into this yard right now, it’d save me an absolute fortune in severance pay. But I don’t want that to happen,” he added firmly. “I want it all sorted out, right now.” He shifted a little to face Mr Gogerty, square on like a boxer. “Thanks for explaining,” he said, “and I think it was very clever of you to figure all that out, but what exactly are you planning on doing about it?”
“Ah.” Mr Gogerty frowned, and a cloud passed over the sun. “That’s not going to be quite so straightforward.”
The motorcade was lost.
The chauffeur of the car containing the chairman of the Bank of England, the Polish minister of culture, the CEO of Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits and the patriarch of Alexandria pulled up and wound down his window. “Excuse me,” he asked the driver of the car he’d just met, “can you tell me how to get to Norton St Edgar?”
Trevor McPherson scowled back at him. “You trying to be funny?” he said.
The chauffeur said no, he wasn’t, and it was a perfectly civil question. Trevor realised that it was, at that. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re in Norton St Edgar right now. You just need to carry on down the lane, left at the crossroads, then on a hundred yards and turn right, and that’ll bring you out by the church. Excuse me,” he went on, his heart pounding, “but where’ve you just come from?”
“Heathrow,” said the chauffeur. “Why?”
Trevor held his breath. “And you didn’t have any bother getting here? No roads closed or anything?”
“Roadworks on the M5,” the chauffeur replied. “That’s about all. Why?”
Behind, the Dalai Lama’s driver was leaning on his horn. “Sorry,” Trevor said quickly. “I’m holding you all up. Take care, now.” He wound up his window, crushed his car into the hedge to get past and shot away up the lane towards the main road. He didn’t get that far, of course. Two minutes later he was back outside his house, sobbing into his coat sleeve.
The chauffeur shrugged and drove on. His satnav seemed to have given up entirely. It kept warbling, “At the end of the road, phase-shift into an alternative universe,” so he switched it off. Clearly the man he’d spoken to was either a practical joker or from out of town, because the lane just wound on and on, with no suggestion of a crossroads or turning. All he needed, he reckoned, was to meet a flock of sheep coming the other way to make this a perfect day.
In the event, it wasn’t sheep; it was chickens.
“It’s not up to me,” Mr Gogerty said.
Mr Huos waited for him to clarify, but he didn’t. Then the implications of Mr Gogerty’s silence began to spread through Mr Huos’ mind like spilt coffee seeping into a keyboard.
“Oh,” he said. “Is that…?”
Mr Gogerty nodded. “The hub,” he said, “has to be put back in the box. Unfortunately, I have no idea what’s going to happen after that, and I’m not prepared to find out by doing it. It’s your ring,” he said. “I think you should be the one to put it back where it belongs.”
For a very long time nobody spoke or moved or breathed. Then Mr Huos sort of twisted away like a child trying to avoid an injection. “What’ll happen to me if I…?” He didn’t finish the sentence and Mr Gogerty didn’t reply. “No,” Mr Huos said. “I won’t do it and you can’t make me. You said yourself, it’s not my fault.”
“Fault’s got nothing to do with it,” Mr Gogerty said sadly. “It’s entirely up to you, of course. You can take the hub back into the containment field and find out what happens, or we can all stand around here for the rest of our lives, if that’s what you really want. To be honest with you, I can’t imagine anything that could happen to you in there that’d be worse than hanging round this farmyard until we all die of old age or starvation, but perhaps you can. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes, there’s a few points I want to clear up with the chickens.”
Mr Huos opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it and let him go. A moment or so later Mr Gogerty was sitting on his heels typing into his personal organiser, a tall mountain towering over a sea of huddling poultry.
“Well,” Mr Huos said, as Polly tried not to look at him. “I suppose I owe you an apology.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Polly replied, her voice as brittle as icicles. “No harm done, I guess. Not by you, at any rate. Or at least not on purpose. What I mean is, yes, you would appear to have completely buggered up my life, and you did it so you could make a lot of money, but I don’t suppose you ever thought the effects would be quite so disastrous for all concerned. Or if you did, you probably thought the risk wasn’t all that great, so you’d probably get away with it. In any case,” she concluded, “it’s not all your fault, not really.”
Mr Huos blinked. “Thank you,” he said. “I feel much better about myself now. How about you?” he went on, looking at Don. “What do you think I should do?”
“Me?” Don took a step back. “Not up to me, is it?”
“No,” Mr Huos said patiently, “but just pretend it was. What would you do if you were me?”
“Easy,” Don said quickly. “Nothing on earth could make me get inside that horsebox thing. You couldn’t get me in there at gunpoint. And you know why?”
Mr Huos smiled. “I can probably guess, but tell me anyway.”
“Because,” Don said, “I’m weak, gutless, self-centred as a gyroscope and completely lacking in conscience and social responsibility. How about you, Mr Huos? Are you all those things too?”
Mr Huos thought for a while. “If I’ve understood this correctly,” he said, “if I go in there, chances are I’ll turn into a pig.”
“Back into a pig,” Polly amended helpfully. “And it’s all just Mr Gogerty’s theory. He could be completely wrong. I mean, just think about it. It’s further-fetched than apples from New Zealand.”
Mr Huos nodded. “You reckon,” he said.
“Well, of course,” Polly said brightly. “Transdimensional hubs, containment fields, people being lost in time and turned into chickens. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. I think it’s all complete crap, don’t you, Don?”
Don nodded very slowly. “It’s a bit short on empirical proof, certainly,” he said.
“Wild speculation, I’d call it,” Polly said. “Not a shred of evidence to suggest walking into that horsebox would have any bad effects at all. Don’t you agree, Don?”
“You know what,” Mr Huos said, and his voice seemed to come from somewhere down around his socks. “I think you’re right. It’s all just a lot of fuss over nothing – Stan Gogerty trying to make out he’s solved some great big enormous mystery so he can whack in a great big enormous bill. So,” he went on, quietly, almost grimly, but without a trace of either anger or despair, “why don’t I go inside that horsebox right now, and show him up for the rip-off merchant he really is? Well, what d’you think?”
Human beings think words are the big deal, the universal tool, the measure of all things, but there are times when words are about as much use as a soda siphon in a firestorm. “Good idea,” Polly said in a very small voice, and Don could only nod. Mr Huos smiled at them, and Polly thought, That’s my boss, and he’s about to walk calmly into the box and get turned into a pig. Heroes are a bit like supermodels. The papers and glossy magazines are full of them, but we’re led to believe they’re really a different species, not something you or I could ever become just by deciding to. And particularly not someone’s boss. The terms “heroism” and “senior management” exist in separate universes. “Bye, then,” Polly said, and Mr Huos walked into the box. The ramp that was also a door swung up unaided and closed with a bang. They waited, but nothing much happened.
“He’s gone inside then.” Mr Gogerty had rejoined them.
They didn’t reply; it wasn’t as though Mr Gogerty was relying on them for crucial information.
“What did you say to him?” Mr Gogerty asked.
Polly shook her head; Don said, �
��Oh, nothing.” All three of them were too preoccupied to notice that the chickens had left the yard in a flock and gone scurrying up the lane.
“We must’ve got through after all,” Ms Byron said, her eyes fixed on the column of long black cars bumping slowly down the farm track, like women in high heels walking in mud.
“What did you say to them?” asked Charles the Mahler expert, struggling to keep up with her.
“I kept it simple,” Ms Byron replied. “I just said, ‘norton st edgar, worcs, we aren’t really chickens, take us to your leader.’ But it looks like they’ve come to us instead.”
Not the form of words that he’d necessarily have chosen, Charles thought, but apparently it had worked just fine. The cars hit a muddy patch and slithered around a bit. A police outrider fell off his bike and landed in a wide brown puddle, spraying muddy water all over the windows of an enormous stretch Mercedes. “They got here very fast,” Charles observed.
“It shows they’re taking us seriously,” Ms Byron replied, and Charles, thinking about it, decided she was the sort of person who would interpret this particular subset of facts in that particular way. Mind, she could be right.
Ms Byron stopped in the exact centre of the track and spread her wings. She took a deep breath, then called out (in a voice that a human could easily mistake for mere clucking) “Welcome. Thank you for coming. Together I feel sure we can solve this mystery and, working together—”
That was as far as she got. The lead car wasn’t stopping. Just in time she burst into flight, her wings flapping wildly, and managed to clear the left front tyre of the oncoming limo by the thickness of a cigarette paper. The other chickens scattered, and watched as the motorcade rumbled past.
“We should go and see if he’s all right,” Polly said.
Don made a furious-scared noise. Mr Gogerty didn’t seem to have heard. She couldn’t blame either of them, Don in particular. It hadn’t been long since she’d said more or less the same thing to him, leading him to his rendezvous with the Big Voice in the ruined abbey. Fair enough, Polly thought. My turn.
She took a few steps towards the horsebox, realised with a certain degree of annoyance that neither Don nor Mr Gogerty was going to stop her, and carried on the rest of the way. There was a handle on the door for pulling it down. It came down easily.
Inside the box was a pig.
She looked at the pig, and the pig looked back at her and made that unique barking noise pigs make. She noticed that it had a ring through its nose.
“Hello,” Polly said.
The pig snuffled at her, then advanced, unsure of its footing on the slatted ramp. She wished she had something she could give it: an apple or a swede, or whatever it is pigs like to eat. She stood aside to let it pass and it stepped out onto the concrete, acting a bit dazed, like a released hostage.
Polly rejoined the others, and they watched the pig saunter slowly (pigs’ trotters were never designed for walking on concrete) across the yard towards the nearest sty, whose gate was conveniently open. Don tried to remember the quotation about it being a far, far better thing, but Polly said, “After all, he was a property developer.” He felt she had a point, but that didn’t cover it completely.
“Interesting,” Mr Gogerty said.
“What?”
“It’s a sow,” he said.
“So?” Polly snapped. “Why shouldn’t a sow be a successful property tycoon?”
Mr Gogerty raised his eyebrows. “No reason, I guess,” he said. Then he noticed something out of the corner of his eye and turned to look. At the same moment, Polly said, “Don, who are all those people?”
They advanced in a column like a school crocodile, except they weren’t holding hands. They took no notice of Polly or Don, though the Japanese foreign minister nodded slightly to Mr Gogerty. They headed straight for the pigsty as though they were radio controlled.
“Oh,” Mr Gogerty said under his breath. “I see.”
The old saddleback sow lifted her head and gazed across the yard at the procession of people coming towards her. She felt a trifle confused because the last thing she could remember was climbing inside the horsebox to look for her piglets, all the many litters of piglets who’d disappeared inside and never come out again. And now, by a remarkable coincidence, here they were coming towards her.
A piglet (but my, how he’d grown) stepped up to the sty gate, stopped and stood there awkwardly. He was dimly aware that he was, or had at some point been, the chief executive officer of Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits, but that wasn’t the main thing on his mind at that moment.
“Mother?” he said.
The old saddleback sow grunted and smiled at him. “Hello, dear,” she said, as the archbishop of Cologne shuffled up behind him, peered over his shoulder and mumbled, “Hello, Mum.” At that moment the old sow was happy, happier than if she’d been given a sackful of apples, and so she wasn’t interested in eavesdropping on Mr Gogerty explaining how the transformation field must have acted retrospectively and turned all Mr Huos’ offspring into humans too. She was just glad to see them all, and know they were safe, and that the implied covenant with Humankind on which she’d always relied had been proved true in the end. They’d taken her piglets from her, but only for their own good, to give them a better start in life than she could have offered them. So that, she decided, was all right, and silly her for having doubted it for a minute.
“The next minute,” a piglet was telling her, “I woke up on this hillside in the Atlas Mountains, with nothing but a suit of clothes and a bundle of cash in my pocket. Luckily some of the local people found me and looked after me, and when I was old enough I used the money to pay my way through college, and now I’m the Sikorsky professor of solid state physics at Kiev University, so it hasn’t turned out too bad. So,” the piglet went on, after a short pause to draw breath, “how’ve you been keeping?”
The sow tried to remember. “Oh, can’t complain,” she replied. “Now mind out of the way and let me say hello to your brother.”
As the procession of the great and good turned into something between a greeting line and a book signing, Polly shook her head and said, “That’s so weird. All those people…”
Mr Gogerty mumbled something about collateral forces and interdimensional feedback, even contriving to drag in both Newton and Einstein, and Don, who knew enough science to be able to recognise at least one word in ten of what he was hearing, didn’t doubt him for a moment. Interstitiary shear combined with temporal z-axis shunts; absolutely, no question about it, that must have been what happened, and it was nice of Mr Gogerty to explain it all in such detail. But it wasn’t science; like hell it was science. It wasn’t even magic (which, as he now knew, was simply science nobody’s got around to writing up for the journals yet). In fact, he hadn’t any real idea what it was, though he fancied that if he was a really seriously good mathematician he might be able to describe it in equations. As far as he was concerned, though, it was quite simply the right thing to have happened. If his life was a seven-note jingle, this would be note number five, the one that nobody ever hears but which makes all the difference.
While he was thinking all that, Polly was talking to him. He was so used to tuning her out while he was deep in thought that he only caught the very end of it, namely, “. . . wants a word with you.”
He frowned. “Say again?”
Polly sighed. “I said,” she said, “I think that man over there wants a word with you.”
“What man?”
Shuffling into his dressing gown and slippers, George Williams slumped downstairs to the kitchen and put the kettle on. Another day, he thought. Another day, in all probability, just like the last one and the one before that. Not that he was one to complain. He liked things neat and tidy and orderly, and he was only too well aware that he had plenty to be grateful for. A nice little business, with plenty of goodwill and regular customers, in a good location. You don’t mess about with a winning formula, after al
l. Even so. He wandered through into the shop and twitched aside the blind so he could take a peek at the quiet street outside. Same view as always: same doors opposite, same cars parked, and he knew most of the early-bird commuters heading for the bus stop and the station either by name or by sight. When you trade from the same premises for fifteen years, you become part of the landscape. No quarrel with that. Good for business.
Even so.
It’ll be different, he thought as he poured the hot water into the mugs, when we retire. We can relax a bit more, take it easy. We could travel. That was something he’d always wanted to do – a bit of the Gypsy in him, Eileen always reckoned – but of course, with the shop and everything, that had been pretty much out of the question. It must be fun, he thought, to wake up in the morning and, for those first few seconds of being awake, not to know where you are; to pull back the curtains and see a different view, unfamiliar streets populated with strangers. Best of all (he smiled as he thought about it) not to have to spend the whole day getting the marks and stains out of other people’s mucky clothes. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Be careful what you wish for, his mother had always told him; be careful, or you might just get it. Always coming out with stuff like that, she was, stuff that sounded good but, when you stopped and thought about it, didn’t really mean anything. Take one day at a time was another of her favourites, and there were others he’d never quite been able to make sense of, like Things in pockets should stay in pockets and Never open little wooden boxes in the downstairs lav. Of course, she’d got a bit strange near the end, and when that happens, you gradually stop listening.
By the time he unlocked the door for the first customers of the day, he’d put the unsettling thoughts clean out of his mind. Too much to do for one thing, and besides, in the dry cleaning game there were always surprises. The two men who came in bang on the dot of nine, for example: big blokes, a bit red in the face, between them lugging a great big wicker basket.
