by Tom Holt
Frank hadn’t mentioned any of that to Mr Tanner, though he was sure he’d have been interested. On reflection, that was shortsighted. Mr Tanner was, after all, the first real live magician he’d ever met (apart from Mum and Dad, of course, who didn’t count). As such, he presumably knew about stuff like eternal-youth tablets. He’d know if they really were irreversible; and if so, whether there was some other stuff you could take that would override the effects. Frank had his doubts about that. Most likely, he reckoned, it’d be harder to get R&D funding for an elixir of eternal middle age. The point was, Mr Tanner would know if anybody did. If there wasn’t one, maybe he could invent it. In return for money, of course, but that at least wouldn’t be a problem. If he really could come up with something, some miracle cure that’d make the real world bearable again for his poor, abused parents - well, there was still the small matter of finding them, in a place where even the Portable Door couldn’t go. One step at a time.
He looked both ways and crossed the road. Of course, if he did hire Mr Tanner, it might be an idea not to mention to him that it was Mum and Dad he wanted the stuff for. However strong a motivator money might be, Frank had a suspicion that it might not get the job done in this particular case.
Always assuming, of course, that Mr Tanner would agree to see him again. There was definitely a bit of unresolved hostility there. Not to mention what Bobby had done to his phone cables.
Goblins, he thought. Goblins.
Quick look over his shoulder, and then he slid the Door out of its tube, held it up against the hoarding, smoothed out the wrinkles with a practised sweep of his hand, and turned the doorknob. He winced as he stepped through, because it was raining on the other side. It always rained there, back home.
(Can the word home possibly have any meaning to someone with a Portable Door? Frank had reservations about that, too. The Door changed everything, or at least it turned all the straight lines and edges to jelly. He always went back to these precise coordinates in time and space, in spite of the horrible clammy rain, so presumably it was his home. Strange place to pick; strange moment. He had no idea why he’d chosen it.)
As he pulled the door to after him, he heard a shrill yap. He sighed. ‘Come on, then, if you’re coming,’ he said wearily, and the dog hopped in over his feet, cringed as the raindrops hit the top of its head. He slammed the door and put it away.
On the other side, where a builder’s hoarding had suddenly reverted to being blank and featureless, something moved in the gutter. At first it was no more than a trick of the light-or, properly speaking, its absence. Movement defined it, turning it from a vague black blur into a recognisable shape: the two-dimensional silhouette of a dog, complete with frantically wagging tail. After a moment, it sat-sideways, of course, since it couldn’t do Up-and its raised head and eloquently expressive nose pointed at the place on the hoarding where the illusion of a door had briefly been. It waited, but the Door didn’t come back. The shape of a front paw stretched like bubblegum across the pavement, met the wall and bent at right angles, grotesquely extended, carrying on up the hoarding to where the knob had been. It dabbed at the spot, but there wasn’t anything there.
The shadow of a dog can’t whimper, so it didn’t. The paw shape retreated to the position it had started from. The shadow sat, alert and at attention, like a negative of the HMV symbol. As the hours wore on it moved a little, but only because the angle of the sun changed. It had no mind of its own, needless to say; even less of one than the animal in whose image it had been formed. But the shape knew how to sit, because it had been trained. On some level so obscure and complex that even the most brilliant quantum physicist couldn’t begin to describe it, the shape vaguely remembered that there was a connection between sitting and little bits of chopped-up liver.
Concepts of loyalty and patience have no relevance in the context of a patch of concrete where photons can’t reach because there’s something in the way. Even so; there’s a fair chance that it’d be there yet if the shadow of a woman hadn’t strolled horizontally towards it, whistled and said, ‘Here, boy.’
CHAPTER THREE.
She knew she’d come to the right address when she saw the young man. He was tethered to the reception desk by one of those plastic-covered bicycle chains, and the red glow of shame from his cheeks was bright enough to toast cheese.
‘Excuse me,’ she asked him, ‘but is this Amalgamated Extrusions?’
The young man looked wretchedly at her and shuddered. “Sright,’ he mumbled.
She nodded. ‘You’re the sacrifice, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
She thought: traditionally it should be a young woman, but this is the twenty-first century. Did it make him feel any better to know that he was an equal-opportunities sacrifice? Probably not. Of course, it didn’t say anywhere in the book of rules that the sacrifice had to be a girl. The only requirement was that it should be a vir
‘Soon have you out of there,’ she said briskly. ‘You just hang on, keep very still, and everything’s going to be fine. Now, where can I find Mr O’Leary?’
He frowned. ‘You’re the whatsit? The, um’
Oh dear. ‘I’m from Carringtons,’ she said. ‘Emily Spitzer, pest control. Do you think you could ring through to Mr O’Leary and let him know I’m here?’
The young man whimpered softly. Emily looked at the security chain, and compared its length with the distance to the phone on the desk. ‘No, obviously you can’t,’ she said. ‘Do you happen to know his extension number?’
‘Six,’ the young man mumbled.
‘Thanks.’ Surely the whole point of a sacrifice was that it should be something you’ll miss when it’s gone; otherwise it’s simply not entering into the spirit of the thing. She poked in the number. ‘Mr O’Leary? Emily Spitzer, Carringtons. I’m in your front office.’
‘About time.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I said, about time. I called your people two hours ago. That may be your idea of a prompt, efficient service, but it bloody well isn’t mine.’
Mr O’Leary wasn’t to know, because he was sitting in his office six floors up. If he’d been down in reception, the look on Emily’s face would’ve told him that he’d just done a very silly thing; on a par with walking up to a group of off-duty paratroopers in a pub just before closing time and asking them why they were wearing those poncy little red hats. ‘So sorry, Mr O’Leary,’ she said sweetly, ‘I got here as soon as I could. If you could just switch on the system, I can get started.’
The phone went dead. She put the receiver back, stepped away from the desk and turned to face the ventilation grille in the wall. Somewhere far away, a fan began to spin. Emily unzipped her bag and counted under her breath.
She’d got as far as six when the plasterboard surrounding the grille exploded into dust and rubble, and something really rather horrible burst out of the ventilation shaft, hung in the air for a moment, and slithered down from the hole onto the desk.
It’s just as well that hydras are mythical creatures and don’t really exist. If there really were such things, mankind would have to find a way of coping with a species of giant snake, nearly five times longer and thicker than an anaconda or a boring old boa constrictor, and equipped with somewhere between forty and a hundred heads, each attached to the main trunk by a separate neck, the way grapes connect to the bunch. The number of heads would vary because if you were misguided enough to try and kill the wretched thing by cutting off a head, two more would instantly sprout in its place. Luckily for the human race, the hydra is just a dark-age myth, symbolising winter or redwater fever in livestock, or possibly the kind of problem that just gets worse when you try and solve it.
The sacrifice squealed and started tugging frantically at the lock-up chain, which was only looped round the leg of the desk. ‘Keep still!’ Emily snapped. It was fortunate that the sacrifice was the kind of young man who’s far more scared of girls than he is of ferocious mythical monsters. H
e did as he was told.
The trick is, of course, to attack strengths, not weaknesses.
Emily popped the lid off the aerosol spray and lifted it. The hydra was holding perfectly still, waiting for her to come within striking range. Mythical or not, it was a snake, capable of moving blindingly fast, inherently practical enough not to waste its energy on a non-viable target. Stay six feet away and you’re safe. Five feet, and you’re a paragraph in the obituaries column in the trade paper.
Calmly, because hydras are very good indeed at picking up on fear, Emily shook the can. The rattle of the little ball-bearing was disconcertingly loud in the dead silence.
Only a mug tries to deal with an enemy that has an average of seventy self-replicating heads by pruning it. A sensible and experienced person, a professional, takes the view that seventy heads means a hundred and forty eyes, and that her best friend is therefore her spray-can of Mace.
‘I suggest you shut your eyes,’ Emily told the sacrifice. She couldn’t look round to see if he’d obeyed, because of the need to maintain eye contact with the hydra. (Try it sometime, by the way: a ratio of seventy to one. Keep it up for more than ten seconds and you’ll completely redefine your concept of headaches.) Very gradually she lifted the can until the nozzle was level with the approximate centre of the thicket of heads.
Schedule D to Section 34 (a) of the Endangered Monsters (Conservation) Order 1998 requires that once a hydra has been blinded with an approved spray (as defined in Schedule D part 2, paragraph (D) (iv) (3)), it’s the responsibility of the licensed control practitioner to immobilise it as quickly as possible with a permitted tranquilliser administered by injection or intravenous drip. The hydra should then be removed within two hours (three hours in Wales, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man) to a holding pen constructed in accordance with the specifications set out in Schedule E part 6, to await relocation to a designated hydra reserve. The only exception provided for in the regulations is bona fide scientific or medical research; in which case, it’s permitted to pump 20ccs of liquid SlayMore into it and hide behind a pillar until it’s stopped thrashing about.
The pest-control department of Carringtons is on record as being engaged in a long-term research project into hydra toxicology. Their aim is to find out how much SlayMore it takes to kill the buggers and, as far as they’re concerned, if you want to end up with good science there’s no such thing as too much data.
‘It’s all right,’ Emily said, peering round the edge of the pillar. ‘You can open your eyes now.’
‘Is it’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’
It wasn’t fair, she told herself, to expect ordinary normal people to be brave. There’s a good reason why fear is included in the package of software bundled with every new human being, and a world full of heroes simply wouldn’t function. Even so. It’d be nice, one of these days, to meet a civilian who didn’t faint or freeze or wet himself while she was in action. For one thing, it’d imply that he trusted her to do her job. Somehow, she couldn’t help thinking it’d be different if it had been Ricky Wurmtoter or Kurt Lundkvist or Christian Macdonald wielding the Mace can and the big syringe. That said, there was no call to go taking out her sense of general grievance on the public.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, in her best approximation to a calm, soothing voice. ‘I know it was scary and horrid, but it’s all over now and for crying out loud stop that ridiculous snivelling.’
(For the record, Emily’d had seven boyfriends, none of them for long. The most recent had been a six-foot-eight rugby international. She hadn’t been particularly surprised to discover that he was terrified of spiders in the bath.)
She rang Mr O’Leary.
‘All done,’ she said crisply. ‘Clean-up’ll be along in about an hour. Don’t let anybody touch anything till they’ve gone if you value your no-claims. Oh, and you’d better get someone down here with the key to the bike lock. And some Dettol and a sponge.’
I’m probably not a very nice person, Emily reflected as she rattled back to the office on the Tube. A nice person would’ve have drawn that poor boy’s little accident to the attention of his ignorant pig of an office manager. And it’s all very well to say that a nice person wouldn’t be in this line of business, but does that necessarily follow, or am I only saying it because I’m not nice?
She shook herself like a wet dog. Niceness, she decided, wasn’t everything. The lad chained to the desk was probably extremely nice and, if she was honest with herself, she found it hard to believe that he and she belonged to the same species.
Emily filled in the operations report and the travel expenses voucher and attached them to her timesheet with a paperclip. Wednesday; on Wednesdays she usually had lunch with Marcia and Jane from Snettertons at the pizza place in the Strand, but Marcia was on holiday and she couldn’t stand Jane if Marcia wasn’t there to hold her lead. Am I really not a very nice person? she wondered. Surely not. I have friends-Jane, Marcia … (It occurred to her that she didn’t actually like either of them very much: one was a bitch and the other was silly, that particular blend of calculating frivolity that made you feel uncomfortable all the time. There was something gritty and sharp-eyed about Marcia when she was being silly. She was as sinister as a clown.)
All right, she conceded to herself. I may not like my friends very much, but my friends like me. They couldn’t like me if I wasn’t basically a nice person. I have redeeming qualities. I’m calm, level-headed, sensible, honest, realistic. I tell it how it is. I don’t muck about. I have standards.
She played that last bit back. Dear God, she thought.
Not that it mattered. Emily’d known way back in college that if she intended to make a career for herself in pest control she was going to have to be single-minded about it. There would be sacrifices. (Suddenly she thought of the skinny young man standing on his patch of damp carpet. She smiled.) In pest control, all work and no play meant you might just stand a chance of staying alive long enough to get your money’s worth out of a month’s rent paid in advance. If you were really diligent, committed, focused and determined, you might even contrive to get the job done and still have your licence at the end of it, in spite of the vast accumulation of brain-pulping Byzantine regulations that you had to comply with in order to slay monsters legally. That kind of commitment didn’t leave much time for anything else. There was even a saying in the trade: you can’t get a life and take one too.
Eight years of that sort of thinking does things to a person. These days, if she had a feminine side, it was probably the Goddess in her aspect as Kali the Destroyer.
Which reminded her: credit-control meeting with Dave Hook at three-fifteen. Bugger. My cup runneth over, Emily thought, and little dribbles are trickling down inside my sleeve.
Dragons can burn you or flay you alive with their claws. Manticores can shred your face with a flick of their tongues; harpies excel at fly-by scalpings, and their prehensile, six-fingered tails can slice the top of your head off like a boiled egg and dip soldiers in your brain. All Dave Hook could do was look at you and go ‘Tut.’
I’m brave, Emily thought. Really I am. But the little voice in her head said: no, you aren’t, not really. Bravery is defined as facing up to the things that really scare you. Monsters can kill you, but this man can take away your job.
Mr Hook put down the spreadsheet, looked at Emily over the top of his glasses, and frowned. ‘Tut,’ he said. She winced.
‘You’re doing the work,’ he said. ‘No question about that. Everything bang up to date. First-class turnaround time. Outstanding feedback from the clients. But those bills just aren’t getting sent out, are they?’
‘No. Urn.’
‘We’re in this business to make money, after all.’
‘Urn.’
‘There’s no point doing the work if we don’t get paid for it, is there?’
‘Urn.’
Mr Hook sighed, and glanced sideways at the framed photogra
ph on his desk. Mr Hook never ever talked about his family, but the woman in the picture was twenty years younger than him and looked as though she’d just stepped off a catwalk. There was also a small nondescript female child, and a dog. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that we’ve had this conversation before. Isn’t that right?’
‘Mm.’
‘I have an idea that last time you promised me you’d make a real effort to get the invoices written up and sent out on time.’ Pause. His eyes were eating into Emily’s soul like shipworms gnawing a keel in the middle of the Sargasso Sea. ‘That is what we agreed, isn’t it?’
‘Mm.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t quite catch—’
‘Yes. Only,’ Emily added quickly, in a teeny-tiny voice that made her sound about the same age as the kid in the photograph, ‘there’s been ever such a lot to do this month, and I try and keep on top of the paperwork, but it’s not always easy, and I get confused about what’s zero-rated for VAT and what isn’t, and every time I sit down and try and do the apportionments the phone always rings and it’s someone with a dragon or a chimera or something and you can’t keep the clients waiting, and by the time I get back to the office it’s been driven right out of my head, and …’
Her words tailed off, like the last few drips from a punctured water-bottle in the desert. Mr Hook looked at her. ‘Sorry,’ she said. Those eyes: like those of a crucified spaniel.
‘Sorry really isn’t good enough, though, is it?’
‘No.’
‘We really are going to have to buck our ideas up, aren’t we?’
‘Mm.’
‘This time, when we promise faithfully that we’re going to try and do better, we’re going to have to mean it, aren’t we?’
‘Mwf.’ Pause. Oh God, Emily thought, he’s about to be nice. I can’t stand it when he’s nice. It’s like having your raw soul scoured with a wire brush.
