The Comeback of the King

by Ben Jeapes

  He leaned across the table so he could whisper.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, I think, on the face of it and on the whole, we’d all be better off if I stayed around from now on to keep an eye on you.”

  “Yeah?”

  As suddenly as they had appeared, his fears slunk off again into the dark corners of his mind and he felt a slow grin creep across his face. A Salisbury with Zoe in it was better in every way than a Salisbury without her, by definition. The probability that she would never be his girlfriend came down to a mere 99.9%, which was still better than the 100% alternative; and if another King-thing happened, he would have an ally and advice to hand.

  “Well,” he said, trying to give the matter reluctant consideration, “that’s an arrangement I suppose I could put up with.”

  *

  Ted hesitated with his key in the lock of his front door. He couldn’t help remembering the last time he had come home from work – Saturday evening, just two days ago, and look what had happened then. But that was all over, and it was cold and damp outside, so he twisted the key and pushed the door open into the warmth and light.

  Immediately he could tell the previous night’s weird atmosphere was gone. It had had twenty-four hours to settle in and everyone’s brains had adjusted to it. This was the new normality.

  Explosions, music, shouts and laughing told him there was a mighty battle going on in the living room, so he looked in there first. Robert and Sarah were locked in titanic conflict, neither of them looking away from the TV or down at their fingers that danced on the remote controllers. Ted sidled over so that he could watch the screen. Two soldiers with an infinite array of weaponry to hand were stalking each other through the post-apocalyptic ruins of an unnamed city and it soon became clear who was losing. Sarah stuck to two or three weapons, using each one for maximum effectiveness, while Robert cycled wildly through his entire armoury with each shot and usually settled on the worst choice for each situation. A hand grenade for a long-distance sniper shot. A handgun to take out one of Sarah’s supporting war drones.

  Ted casually reached out a finger and pressed one of Robert’s option buttons, just as Robert hit ‘fire’. His rifle immediately turned into an atomic laser bazooka that vaporised Sarah, her war drones and the building behind them. Ted’s siblings both stared slack-jawed at the devastation on screen.

  “Awesome!” Robert exclaimed. His face as he looked up at Ted glowed with hero worship.

  “It’s a cheat, but it takes five minutes to recharge after each shot so you can’t use it all the time,” Ted pointed out.

  “That is so unfair!” Sarah stared at him in open-mouthed betrayal. “You didn’t show me that!”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “Neither did he! That is so unfair! I’m telling Mum!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah–” Ted and Robert exchanged boy-to-boy, ‘girls, eh?’ grins and Ted followed the sounds of cooking to the kitchen, with Sarah close behind and kicking him every couple of steps, which he absorbed with patient grace. So far, life back at home was refreshingly normal.

  Ted stuck his head round the kitchen door.

  “I’m – ow … home – ow–”

  His mum and Barry were both in there. She was chopping something on the board, he was next to her stirring something on the cooker, and there might have been as much as a quarter of an inch of daylight between them. He lowered his face and nuzzled the top of her head. She rested her head briefly on his shoulder before going back to the cooking. Only then did Barry glance up and grin at him.

  “Hi, Ted. Dinner in about twenty minutes, and because we never watched our usual Saturday night movie it’s still your turn to choose one.”

  So, no mention of why they hadn’t watched their usual Saturday night movie.

  “I – ow … thought I’d let Sarah choose,” Ted said. The kicking immediately stopped. His mum shot him a grateful glance, and as he withdrew she was leaning back into Barry’s one handed embrace, tilting her head back so they could kiss.

  “Do you think they’ll do it tonight?” Sarah whispered as Ted headed for the stairs. He winced.

  “I’ve told you before, they did it exactly once, on their wedding night, and then they promised never again.” From the sceptical look she gave him, Ted wasn’t sure Sarah still believed him.

  “Delivery for you, Ted!” his mum called behind him. “Looks like your Christmas shopping is starting to arrive!”

  Oh, arse, I still have to do that …

  The package was on the hall table. It was a small, flat cardboard box, the type books were delivered in. The address label was printed in blocky computer-readable type but it looked like the postman had got rained on and the sender’s details were blurred and stained. The delivery address was quite clear, though, and it was indeed made out to him.

  Ted knew he hadn’t ordered any books lately, so it had to be a present from someone, though he had thought he had everyone trained to give him gift vouchers or cash. He shrugged and went on upstairs.

  “You’re supposed to put presents under the tree!” Sarah called.

  “At least let me open the box, hey?” Ted rolled his eyes as he went into his room. He chucked his bag on the bed, studied the box one more time and pulled the tab to open it. A neat ribbon of cardboard peeled back and the book slid out into his hand. It wasn’t gift-wrapped.

  “Huh?” He held it up, frowning.

  It was a slightly battered hardback, very second hand. If it had arrived at work he would have listed it on the website as: condition poor; 6" x 9", no jacket, cloth bound, boards chipped, marked, stained, bumped at edges, backstrap missing but spine still holds. It really wasn’t in the kind of condition that Malcolm would have been prepared to sell from his shop.

  He opened it to flick through the yellowed pages but the paper was so thick he could only pick through it one page at a time. The text was in an old-fashioned typeface, something like Baskerville. He tried to read a couple of sentences but the style was at once so dry and so florid – verbs in all the wrong places, no single word used on its own when a whole phrase would do – that it was like reading Teflon. His eyes just slid off it. The text actively seemed to resist being understood or remembered. He wasn’t sure he could have read it if he wanted to.

  The title of the book was printed in a coloured cloth box at the top of the spine. He held it up to the light and strained his eyes at the flaked gold lettering.

  The Totality of Myself.

  It sounded either very deep, or arty, or the product of an author to whom modesty was an alien concept, or any combination of the above.

  By … He peered closely at the author’s name, which was in tiny type, no more than 7 or 8 point.

  Noel … Edge.

  The Totality of Myself, by Noel Edge.

  Ted almost dropped the book.

  “Oh, you’re kidding!”

  And suddenly he realised Sarah was standing in the door.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “I want to see your present.”

  “It’s not for you.”

  “So it doesn’t matter if I see it.” She started to come into the room.

  “Go away.”

  “Is it naked ladies?”

  “No! Go away!”

  The book suddenly wiggled in Ted’s hand and opened about halfway through. The page Ted looked down at was headed ‘How to make your sister go away’. Beneath it was a diagram, a glyph, a mass of complex lines and shades like a barcode containing hidden information that had to be read the right way, and somehow Ted felt his eyes hooked on it so that he couldn’t tear them away. The shape seemed to expand, filling first the whole page, then the room around him. The shades and the dots were traceries of power in the air around him and he knew that whatever he said would simply happen.

  “Go away, Sarah.”

  It didn’t even sound like his voice through the roaring in his ears. Abruptly the book had snapped itself shut o
n the glyph and Sarah was flouncing out of the room with a loud ‘huh!’

  Ted held the book up and looked at it in a whole new way, part wanting to open it again, part wanting to throw it away in horror.

  Bloody hell! What are you?

  The book twitched again, but this time just the front cover opened. On the title page was a scrawled dedication:

  ‘To Ted Gorse from his mate Noel Edge. Thanks for teaching me. Hope I can do the same.’

  Two and two were coming together in Ted’s mind. He didn’t know if understanding was seeping in through his fingertips, via his contact with the book, or if it was just himself working it out …

  He already knew the Knowledge had done a runner from his head, and he knew the witch’s acolytes had been unable to find it. Why? Because, the Knowledge had somehow reduced itself to this book and posted itself to him. Suddenly he remembered Inspector Stewart directing the traffic after the Hunter’s storm: the very first vehicle to go past had been a Royal Mail van, heading away from Salisbury. Had the Knowledge simply hitched a ride in a postbag, while behind it the searchers metaphysically tore the city apart looking for it?

  It would be much more than just a book. This was the entirety of the Knowledge that had been in Ted’s head, accessed through a physical portal that just happened to be disguised as a battered, clothbound hardback. But to all intents and purposes, the result was that Ted had a genuine, old-fashioned spell book. Which, like all the best ones in the stories, had a mind of its own.

  “For starters,” he muttered, glaring at the lettering on the spine, “you do not cast a spell on my sister ever again, hear me? Ever again! That’s … that’s … bullying!”

  But even that was a dangerous thing to say, it occurred to him, because it assumed he was going to keep it.

  Twice now he had simply drifted into something that was way bigger than him, totally over his head, and he wasn’t going to let it happen a third time. He dug out his phone and called Zoe’s number, glaring down at the book as the tone rang in his ear.

  “You’ve got a bloody nerve, you know that?” he told it.

  Of course, the thought came to him, he didn’t actually owe the witch anything.

  Except that she had saved his life, and thousands of other lives too, back in the summer, and she had brought the King back to tidy up his own mess yesterday. But apart from that he didn’t owe her anything.

  “Hi, Ted.”

  Zoe was there.

  “Hi–”

  And the Knowledge obviously trusted him.

  Not that he had asked to be trusted.

  “Ted?” He hadn’t said anything for a couple of seconds.

  “I–”

  But it hadn’t meant any harm, and it wasn’t going to cause any now if it stayed as a book, and all it wanted was to not be incarcerated in meta-Salisbury for eternity, which was what the witch would do to it if she could.

  Arse!

  “Ted? What is it?” He could hear the worry starting up in her voice.

  “Zoe–”

  “Ted, start talking coherently or I’m coming straight round.”

  Ted swallowed, and shot the book one last, burning glare of resentment.

  “What do you want for Christmas?” he asked.

  [The End]

  Acknowledgement

  Windows® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States and other countries. That is why I deliberately didn’t use either name in this novel.

  During the course of writing this novel, Salisbury’s police station moved from Wilton Road to Bourne Hill, the other side of the city. This was so inconvenient to the action of The Comeback of the King that it has essentially been ignored. It should be fairly obvious that this novel takes place in a parallel universe anyway, and that is just one more example of the differences between theirs and ours.

  Ted’s first appearance

  Even before The Teen, The Witch & The Thief Ted, no surname, appeared in a short story of mine titled ‘The Grey People’.

  In my late teens, I went on one of Salisbury cathedral’s (highly recommended) tower tours: up the narrow spiral staircases set into the walls, edging along narrow balconies high above the nave, and up even narrower, wooden staircases that cling to the inside of the tower (surprisingly full of light from the twenty-foot windows, as if the cathedral were just sheets of fragile stone wrapped around thin air) and all the way up to the base of the spire. Where, the guide pointed out some of the carvings: as intricate and ornate as the rest of the building, even though no one could possibly see them, because God could see them and the craftsmen couldn’t possibly let shoddy work go just because mortal eyes wouldn’t be aware of it.

  A few years later, I wrote ‘The Grey People’. It was published in the short-lived magazine Substance, edited by Paul Beardsley. A few years after that, having finished my novel The New World Order and while I was wondering what my next project should be, ‘The Grey People’ just sort of edged into my head.

  Some changes were called for. Malcolm is the hero of ‘The Grey People’; it was immediately clear that Ted should be the hero of the novel. It also finally dawned on me that ‘The Grey People’ just didn’t work at novel length, even though I went into much more detail about who they were and where they came from. It was an interesting experience to strip out every instance of Grey People, keeping the rest of the novel more or less intact, and fill in the gaping holes with New Added Plot. The result became The Teen, the Witch & the Thief, the first Ted Gorse adventure.

  And here is where it all started. If you’ve read the first novel (and if not, why not?), have fun spotting the similarities and differences. I should add that Ted’s understanding of computers was spot on – for the early 1990s …

  Ben Jeapes

  February 2016

  The Grey People

  There was a breeze at the top of the tower, of course. Even when the day below was still and warm, up here the air would always move, gentle and cool.

  Malcolm Lloyd squinted up at the deep blue sky that vaulted the top of the tower where he and the rest of the tour party stood. The cathedral spire, the tallest in Britain, sprouted from the top of the tower and soared up towards heaven. The recent restoration work had left it gleaming new.

  Malcolm looked down, very carefully, over the parapet at the roof of the west transept of Salisbury Cathedral below. It was a long way down. He was suspended between heaven and Earth on a platform of medieval stone. He put out a hand and felt its comforting solidity. The platform was well-anchored in reality.

  “Just look at these carvings,” said a voice in his ear. He slid an arm round Caroline’s waist; she snuggled up to him in a reflex that had become automatic over the last thirty years.

  “Aren’t there a lot of them?” she said. There were the usual gargoyles at the corners of the tower: elsewhere the stonework was covered with vague forms that could have been saints or sinners, blurred by the centuries of weathering.

  “Frightens off the evil dark,” Malcolm said. “The church didn’t have a lot of faith in its own ability to ward off wickedness so it called in outside help.”

  “It must have taken ages to do.”

  “The guide will know how long,” said Malcolm.

  “Why did they go to all this trouble? No one ever came up here to see them.”

  “Ah, but God could see them.” Malcolm knew he was slipping into his lecture theatre tone again, but it was an old habit. “God would know there weren’t any carvings up here and the stonemasons would know that God would know.” He looked at the carvings thoughtfully. Kindred souls, those long-dead masons. Kindred souls. They knew that the cathedral wouldn’t be complete without these carvings. They understood.

  “Whatever you say.” Caroline could tell that her husband was sinking into a philosophical mood. She turned her attention back to the guide, who was talking about Christophe
r Wren’s modifications to the building.

  Malcolm shut his ears to the guide’s professional rambling and studied the stone again. He had been too intent on the vaunted view to notice the carvings at first; they were so much part of the cathedral, they were what you expected. He reached out a hand and caressed one, savouring the love and attention that the man who had carved it had put into it.

  He was all alone. The quiet suddenly pressed in on him and he looked around quickly. The party had vanished and he was completely on his own up here. Then he saw the guide lurking just inside the door to the staircase, and he sighed. Silly to get so worked up …

  He hurried to join the rest of the party shuffling down the narrow spiral staircase that led into the heart of the tower.

  “Come on,” Caroline said. “Let’s see how the Menial’s doing.”

  *

  The Menial was a student from the technical college named Ted, who shared the bibliophilia of his employers. He sat in front of a computer in one corner of The Agora, a converted shoe shop in Salisbury’s New Canal. Its purchase had been lubricated by the golden handshake that had been Malcolm Lloyd’s reward for three decades of academic service and now it was halfway through its transformation into the literary and academic emporium that Malcolm and Caroline dreamed of. “Blackwells of Oxford, Heffers of Cambridge, stand back. Here comes The Agora of Salisbury,” Malcolm had joked. The grand opening was a month away.

  “Hi y’all,” Ted said affably as they let themselves in. His eyes didn’t stray from the computer screen as he finished adding the details of the book on the table next to him. The database files would not only help keep track of stock but would eventually be loaded into the desktop publisher so Ted could set the shop’s first catalogue. “So, did you like it?”

  “Very much, yes,” said Caroline.

  “Quite excellent,” Malcolm conceded. One of Ted’s other titles was the Native Guide, born and bred in deepest Wiltshire. He had recommended that they go and see the cathedral in the first place, to take a break from setting the shop up. He himself had cheerfully spent a hot Saturday afternoon putting book titles onto the computer.