by Heide Goody
“For both?”
“For both.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.” Ray brought his clipboard round to show him. “I can show you the details, all protected by the Direct Debit Guarantee. You can cancel at any time.”
“And it will only cost me a fiver?”
“And maybe your soul,” said Ray and laughed because it was funny.
“What am I supposed to do?” said Vaughn Sitterson.
Morag Senior looked up from the text alert on her phone and gave the consular chief a blankly enquiring look but it was a pointless gesture. Vaughn never looked at her face. He’d probably struggle to pick her out of a line-up. He could never be called to identify her corpse if the Venislarn eventually killed her.
“We have a foreign office representative in the restricted ward who screams constantly when he’s not sedated,” said Sitterson, flicking between windows on his computer. “We have all manner of topological irregularities in the Vault. And we still have a case to answer to the ministry for that nasty business with Ingrid Spence and the release of Zildrohar-Cqulu.”
“I’m sure they’ve got spare bods they can send up here when they want that case answering.”
“Are you making light of what happened yesterday?”
“No,” said Morag, feeling in her voice a tone halfway between cheery indifference and indignation. “I am acutely aware that our ministerial overlords sent us a public school dweeb whose ignorance, arrogance and sense of entitlement were the primary causes of an incident in which nobody died.”
“But the fact that he was even able to break such a hazardous artefact –”
“One we collected only this month – one among several artefacts that seem to have randomly appeared in the city recently – and which no one has been able to properly assess or catalogue. And that would be an issue for the new tech support person, wouldn’t it?”
Vaughn made a thoughtful noise, toyed with a pen and looked at his computer screen.
“Am I being fired?” asked Morag.
“Of course not,” said Vaughn at once.
“Am I being formally disciplined?”
His eyes moved towards her but his gaze skirted her face at the last moment. The man was being an absolute flirt.
“Let’s consider this an informal formal warning, shall we?”
“Very good, sir.”
Morag stood and left, pausing only at the door to glance back at her boss – just to see if he dared look at another human when their back was turned. Not today.
She looked at the text. It was from Cameron.
TRAIN ARRIVING AT NEW STREET STATION. 7:10PM. DINNER PLANS?
The customer filled out the paperwork on the doorstep. He didn’t invite Ray in. People almost never invited him in, even when they were buying. The customer – Edward Winters, 36 Harborne Road, B15 3DH, mainly uses internet for streaming television, doesn’t use the landline phone at all – let Ray stand on the driveway while filling in the forms and eating his toast. Ray didn’t know if people didn’t invite salesmen in at all or whether it was just him. He had noticed the way some had looked at his face, his scars, with involuntary but unmistakeable revulsion. Many refused to shake his hand, even when the deal was done. Of course, the looks he got from women were something else. Some of those cougars and stay-at-home milfs, they were just itching to drag him inside, to –
“What’s this bit?” said Ed, flipping to the next page which had an intricate printed border and a hologram sticker in the top corner. “Kaha-aid lo…ax…rid…?”
“Kaha-aid loaxridi kurm-rhovi chedian. It’s all just legal speak, mate. There’s a plain English version underneath.” He craned forward as though to read it, even though he knew every word. “You need to sign this document to get your discount. It allows my company to offer you a reduced rate in exchange for key intangibles –”
“Sure, sure,” said Ed, already signing.
“And you’ve got to sign again at the bottom, there and there, to indicate that you agree to the terms and conditions of the sale and have freely consented to the sale in full knowledge that –”
“Done,” said Ed and passed the clipboard back to Ray.
“Thank you,” said Ray. He tore off the relevant carbon copies and information sheets and passed them back to Ed. “You’ll receive a new router in the post in the next three to five business days and can make the switch over from then.”
“Great,” said Ed and shut the door.
Ray walked back to the pavement and, leaning his briefcase against the brick and wrought iron wall at the edge of the property, sorted the broadband paper work and the ‘intangibles’ certificate into separate folders. There were fifty completed certificates in the folder. Nearly enough to make some purchases and pay off some debts at the bank.
“Onwards and upwards,” he told himself and, with a click of the briefcase catches, he continued up the Harborne Road.
Rod parked on Ludgate Hill and looked up at the apartment block.
“I’ve been here before.”
Vivian paid him no mind and walked past the police car parked at the entrance. Rod followed, as Vivian mounted the stairs. On the fourth-floor landing, two police officers casually blocked access to the top floor. She presented her identification and led the way through.
“If you need us to slap him in cuffs, just say,” called one of the cops after them. “Another couple of lads are in the flat.”
The Mammonite was on the fifth floor, standing outside a flat door. He had a sharp suit, a clipboard and a bright smile that was a few degrees skewed out of normal. He looked like a badly photocopied car salesman.
“Who are you?” he said.
“We are from the consular mission. I am Mrs Grey. This is Mr Campbell.”
“I expect better co-operation than this.”
“Than what?”
“Mammon-Mammonson Investments does not expect to have its employees’ valuable and billable time wasted.”
“We have yet to see whose time is being wasted,” said Vivian. “I can assure you, I too have better things to do.”
“I know this flat,” said Rod.
“Yes. Thank you for your idle reminiscences, Rod,” said Vivian.
The Mammonite passed her a sheaf of official looking paperwork. “It’s all there. Black and white.”
Rod knocked on the door. “Annie?”
The door opened immediately. The detective inside looked Rod up and down and let him in.
Annie hadn’t gotten much further with unpacking her boxes since he was here on Monday, but she had escalated her attack on the rotten prawn smell. The air was now a malodorous riot of scented air fresheners, plug-in aromatherapy diffusers, perfumed candles and patchouli body spray.
Annie sat on the sofa, her face the pink and white marble of a woman who had cried herself out some time ago.
“Hi Annie,” he said.
Her face lit up as she recognised him. It was pitiful really.
“Detective Campbell…” she said.
“I’m not with the police, remember?”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said miserably.
“We’ll find out,” he reassured her. “Whatever’s going on, we’ll get to the bottom of it and straighten it out, all right?”
Annie sniffled and dabbed her nose with a wadded tissue.
“Thanks for calling us in,” Rod said to the detectives.
The women looked at each other and then at him.
“We didn’t call you,” said the older one.
“No,” said Vivian, entering the flat with a single sheet of browning, parchment-like card in her hand. “Mr Watts-Mammonson called us. To help retrieve his rightful property.”
Vivian looked at Annie. Annie put the tissue to her mouth.
In the flat, Morag Junior put Steve the Destroyer on sock sorting duty.
She would have cursed her other self for allowing a two-and-a-bit week backlog of laun
dry to build up but who could she blame but herself? One load was washed and dried, a second load on a rinse cycle. Meanwhile, she began the sorting of clothes and shoes to be divided between the two Morags. It was an exercise in personal psychology. Clothes she didn’t think she had any affection for took on new meaning. Even the placing of a vest top or a pair of knickers on one of the two piles tipped its favourability one way or the other. This pile got the cheap but beautiful top from New Look. This pile got the slobby fleece that she simply loved lounging around in.
“This sock has no partner,” said Steve, emerging from beneath the clothes pile with a grey ankle sock.
“There’s some other grey ones there,” said Junior.
“The weaves of the cuffs do not match.”
“It’s close enough.”
“No. No. It will not do!”
“Is the entire entourage of Prein OCD?”
“The cuffs do not match!” declared the rag doll passionately and dived back under.
The world was bent in mysterious ways. As an initiate into the great secrets of the world, Jeffney Ray knew this.
An innocent canal boater or bargee could take their craft out from Birmingham city centre and after negotiating the steep set of locks that ran behind the BT Tower cut down through the relatively short Warwick and Birmingham Junction canal and not see anything more remarkable than an abandoned warehouse or a pair of nesting geese. Yet, at the same time, a person who could find this hidden alleyway or make a shortcut through that particular building, would come out onto the towpaths of a Warwick and Birmingham canal that teemed with Venislarn life.
Ray might have been a player but he trod carefully along the side of The Waters. Large unblinking eyes watched him from behind boarded up windows, from hidden eyries and from just below the surface of the water. The samakha were subtle and unhurried creatures but that didn’t make them cowards. Ray had heard more than one story of a human who had stepped too close to the canal or a dark doorway and a powerful, webbed hand had silently pulled them in, never to be seen again.
Like fifties B-movie monsters, the samakha had a fondness for human women. Bedraggled girls in mouldy leggings or tattered skirts were the only figures in full view this morning, carrying their shopping in homemade string bags or dragging their ugly and scaly offspring behind them. At some point, each of them had probably been pretty, and happy to legally sign herself over to the fish-men. That all changed soon enough. Ray didn’t have a girlfriend – he hadn’t yet decided on which lucky girl he would bestow that honour – but he wouldn’t touch one of these stinking fish-wives. Not unless she really wanted him to.
The buildings on either side of The Waters were covered in ad hoc extensions; roof gardens, wood-made balcony flats and rickety rope bridges sprouted out like fungal growths. Most of the locals lived in the damp vertical shanty town. To occupy an actual bricks and mortar building was to hold considerable status.
Ray crossed one of the more stable bridges – The Waters was no ordinary canal: gods swam in its bottomless depths – and approached a doorway above which a neon sign fizzed and crackled dangerously.
Ray guessed that the tables in this café had been ripped out of some human takeaway shop during a refurb. Now, full of damp, they were swollen and warped, their chipboard undersides slowly disintegrating. Behind a glass counter, southern fried chicken pieces and congealed slices of pizza sat beside raw and anatomical samakha delicacies. The half-breed proprietor prepared foods behind the counter, paring kebab slices off the rotisserie and then dissecting some unidentified green crustacean with the same knife. The place stank of wood rot and shellfish. It was a classy joint by The Waters standards.
Tony T and his lieutenant, Death Roe, were the only customers in the café.
“Wassup Tony,” said Ray. “Yo-cyo l’eaufin sheem-pika, oy?”
Death Roe snorted Pepsi Max out his gills.
“What’s that you say?” said Tony T, not looking up from his bowl of Rice Krispies.
“I said, wassup, Tony,” said Ray.
“You said, ‘Yo-cyo’. Yo-cyo?”
Death Roe gave a ‘ggh!’ of a gill gasp. “Does Tony look like a bitch to you?” he asked, his dangling barbels quivering.
Damn! Venislarn female pronouns! Ray thought quickly.
“Yo… Yoth-cyo…”
“Adn-bhul makin’ it worse, dog,” said Tony. “Sit.”
Tony T was the leader of the Waters Crew. He and his boys were all half-human. The Waters Crew was the most influential of the samakha gangs, bad boys with baseball caps on their fish heads, flick knives down their codpieces and spinning rims on their pimped-up coracles. They didn’t have any real power on The Waters. It wasn’t even that the true samakha and their god-father, Daganau-Pysh, tolerated their antics. The true samakha didn’t understand the Waters Crew’s wannabe gangster antics. As far as they understood, the gangster boys were just kids playing at being human.
“Have you got the goods, Tony?” said Ray, taking a seat.
Death Roe put a tatty carrier bag on the table. Its loose contents settled and threatened to roll out. Tony T took out a dried brown casing the size and shape of a tennis ball.
“Don’t know what the bhul you want ‘em for. These eggs are dead,” he said.
“Then I’m sure you won’t want much for them.”
Tony T tried to give him a shrewd and suspicious look but it was a hard look to pull off with eyes four inches across and no eyebrows.
“Either you’re a dumb zek’ee an’ I should just toss your ass in the canal or you’re up to something. Ggh! What you want them for?”
Play it cool, Ray, he told himself.
“Are you selling, mate, or do you want my life story?” he said.
Tony T threw his spoon down in the bowl. Death Roe casually pulled out an angler’s knife.
Ray opened his briefcase and took out the certificates he’d got signed that morning.
“Soul cash?” said Tony T. “What do I want with that? Ggh!”
“It’s hard currency,” said Ray.
“Don’t need it, dog. I got bitches I own, body and soul. I don’t need more. You – ggh! – you know what I want.”
“What you want, I can’t get,” said Ray.
“Some adn-bhul fixit man you are,” sneered Tony.
“Oh, you misunderstand. I could get you the tickets to Gorgons Gentlemen’s Club. I could get you a private booth with a pre-paid dance from the hottest girls. But they’d turn you away at the door. They do have a dress code.”
“I can buy shoes,” said Tony.
“I think the dress code probably includes no fish.”
“That’s racist muda,” said Death Roe.
“Bhul. It’s like MLK – ggh! – never happened, man,” said Tony. “You’re wasting our time, crik’hu-chat.”
Death Roe pressed the point of his knife against Ray’s inner thigh. One short stab and Ray would bleed to death all over this stinking café. He laughed. (Not nervously, no.) He laughed to show he wasn’t afraid.
His mouth had gone dry. He turned to the guy at the counter. “A bottle of Boost, mate.”
“No Boost,” said the proprietor thickly. “Pepsi?”
“Whatever,” said Ray. “As long as it’s sealed and you’ve not touched it.”
The proprietor slouched over to the chiller unit on feet that flapped like flippers.
“Now, what I can give you…” said Ray, dipping back into his briefcase. “A choice.” He held out an envelope in one hand and a slim box in the other. He looked pointedly at the knife against his leg. Death Roe withdrew it slowly. “A choice. Tickets to a Broad Street night club that has very low lighting and no dress code, plus some two-for-one vouchers for fishbowl cocktails.”
Death Roe twitched. The big guy was interested.
“Or a couple of the latest Samsung phones,” said Ray.
“They the ones that adn-bhul explode?” said Tony.
“Yes, they are.”
“You trying to sell me defective shit?”
Ray shrugged. “There aren’t many guys who have the balls to use a live hand grenade as a mobile phone.”
Tony T laughed: a wet honk, like a goose drowning at the bottom of his wide, piscine throat.
Death Roe pushed the bag of eggs across the table to Ray.
Annie gave a whimper of fear when Vivian invited the Mammonite into the flat.
“Please contain yourself, Miss Castleton,” said Vivian.
“I have a gag somewhere,” offered Watts-Mammonson.
“You stay right there,” said Rod, shifting his stance to emphasise his position between the Mammonite and the terrified woman.
Watts-Mammonson raised a phone and took a photo.
“Your name,” he said to Rod curtly.
Rod opened his mouth to give it but Vivian spoke first.
“His name is not germane to this matter,” she said. “We are here only to discuss the contract you have with this woman.”
“Contract?” said Annie.
Vivian presented her with the parchment-coloured card. It was covered in dense legalese text. There was a hologram sticker in the corner.
“Is that your signature on the bottom?” she asked.
Annie stared at the document.
“There is no doubt regarding the signature,” said Watts-Mammonson. “We don’t make mistakes.”
Rod scoffed and made sure the Mammonite caught his eye as he did. However, he’d already spotted the sheen on the signatures on the document. There was a constrained restlessness in the ink, like a Magic Eye picture aching to pop into existence. No, there’d been no mistake.
“What is this?” said Annie.
“A bill of sale for key intangibles,” said Watts-Mammonson.
“Key…?”
“Your soul,” said Rod.
“My soul? But this was just some terms and conditions thing,” said Annie, her voice fading. “I didn’t know…”
Watts-Mammonson stepped forward to point at the document. Rod turned his whole body – and it was a considerable body – to block him.
“Touch me and bad things will happen,” the Mammonite snapped before shaking his finger at the contract. “Annie Castleton has signed to say she has made a sale in full knowledge of what she has signed up for and that she understands all aspects of the terms of our agreement.”
