The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  ‘Grenades first, isn’t it?’ The voice just behind her had lost that insufferable cockiness. Erskine was worried. Not good. ‘Then the scanner, and then—’

  ‘Then the thunderflashes, masks on, and then the gas bottles.’ Emily was almost sobbing with relief as she said it. Her mind was clear again, and of course she knew what to do. ‘Sorry about that,’ she heard herself say. ‘Just had a funny five seconds. Got those primers in, have you?’

  ‘Nearly. Look, are you feeling all right? Only—’

  ‘Of course I am, I’m fine. And get a move on with those primers. If we stand out here chatting all day they’ll register our body heat and then we’ll be really screwed. Or didn’t they tell you that at college?’

  Erskine handed her the first grenade in dead silence. Oops, Emily thought. Not making the most brilliant first impression here. Not, she added quickly, that it matters a flying fuck what that young stick of celery thinks. Even so.

  ‘Right,’ she said; and, with the fluency of long practice, she breathed in deep and out again, and kicked open the door.

  After that, it was all a bit of an anti-climax. The stun grenades made the whole building shake, and in the complete dead silence that followed she fitted together the three parts of the Everleigh scanner as coolly as if she was putting the little brush thing on her vacuum cleaner at home. Thunderflashes - ho hum, yawn; slip the mask on, turn calmly round to make sure that Erskine’s mask was clipped down properly, then out come the cyanide-gas bottles, twiddle the valve screws, close the door, sit down on the floor, set the timer, get out the latest Robert Harris and chill for ten minutes while the gas does its work—

  ‘Excuse me,’ Erskine said. ‘What are you doing?’

  Emily looked up from her book. ‘Reading,’ she said.

  ‘But—’ Shocked expression, as if she was doing something disgusting. ‘Shouldn’t you be monitoring life signs on the Everleigh scanner?’

  ‘Nah.’ She yawned. ‘You can, if you like. Personally, I find watching a digital readout counting down from three thousand doesn’t really light my fuse. Tell you what,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Why don’t you go and find someone to make us a nice cup of tea? Milk and no sugar.’

  ‘I-Certainly, right away.’ For a split second, she honestly believed he was going to click his heels.

  When Erskine had gone she tried to read, but her eyes just seemed to skid off the page. She shut the book, leaned her back against the wall and closed her eyes. Whatever had happened to her back then - not fear; not fear of death, anyhow, but there are other scary things in the world - it hadn’t been any fun at all, and she needed to figure out what it was before she went any further. Was it, Emily asked herself, just that she’d been working alone for so long that any disruption to her customary procedures was enough to thrown her off balance? Or was it Erskine’s unique ability to create irritation and self-doubt? She considered the evidence-no problem at all concentrating now-and reluctantly decided that it was none of the above.

  True, it was the first time she’d had a trainee tied to her tail, but there’d been plenty of times when the client, or the office manager or the head of security or some other pest had tagged along and got under her feet, and on those occasions she hadn’t gone all soft in the head. Quite the reverse: the annoyance had only made her more focused, as she’d sublimated the irritation into cold, grim determination to do the job and get out of there before she murdered a customer. No, it was something else, something she couldn’t isolate and label. She hadn’t frozen, or let annoyance distract her. Instead, there’d been a moment when she hadn’t been herself, almost as if—

  The monitor beeped, and Emily glanced down. All the indicators were flatlined, and the infra-red showed nine large stationary biomasses, cooling steadily at the appropriate rate. She checked the toxicity level and used her E-Z-Teek telekinesis remote to tap into the building’s environmental controls and set the extractor fans running. Simple, routine magic. Another day at the office.

  Three minutes later, Erskine came back carrying two mugs. One had The World’s Greatest Boss written on the side, and the other one was decorated with dancing cartoon pigs.

  ‘Just waiting for the gas to clear,’ she said brightly. ‘You’d better ring Ibbotsons and tell them we’re ready for clean-up. There were nine of them, so they’ll probably need two skips.’

  ‘Oh.’ Erskine’s face fell. ‘I missed it.’

  ‘What?’

  He shrugged, rather ostentatiously. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring Ibbotsons. Straight away.’

  Emily felt an urge to jab the air with her finger and bark out ‘Make it so,’ but she fought it down. ‘No rush,’ she said. ‘Ten minutes before we can go in there. Loads of waiting about in this game,’ she added. ‘You really should bring something to read.’

  This time when Erskine went away she had no trouble getting into her book; in fact, it was rather nice to have an obedient gofer to do the phoning and fetch the tea, and she found herself wondering what on earth all the fuss had been about. So yes, she’d had a funny turn; but it had happened before the serious business started, it had only lasted a second or two, and once she’d got back into the swing of things it had faded away completely. Lot of fuss about nothing, she reassured herself; you’re just a bit wound up because of having the idiot along.

  ‘I called Ibbotsons,’ Erskine reported, sounding as though he’d just come back from being the first man to reach the South Pole. ‘They’re sending two skips and a crane, just in case.’

  Emily frowned. ‘You weren’t to know,’ she said, ‘but the crane’s a scam. Means they can charge an extra ten per cent, and they know perfectly well they won’t need it. You’ve got to watch them like a hawk or they’ll fatten the bill like a Christmas turkey.’

  ‘Oh.’ He looked so very guilty and sad that she cheered up considerably. ‘Shall I call them back and—?’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘Client pays out-of-pocket expenses, so it’s no skin off our nose. I just don’t like to let them get out of hand. Word gets around if you’re not careful.’ Her monitor bleeped again; she closed her book and stood up. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘That’s the all-clear. We can go in now and check that everything’s OK, and then we can sign off and go back to the office.’ She grinned. ‘Welcome to the pest-control business. What do you think of it so far?’

  ‘Well—’ Erskine said, and she opened the door.

  He was bleating something about objective verification procedures as she peered into the darkened computer room. For a moment, the darkness puzzled Emily, until she glanced up and saw the swathes of dense black cobweb hanging like curtains from the ceiling. Even if the lights were still working, there was no way that stuff would admit the passage of a single photon. She sighed and pulled out her pocket torch.

  The first spider she saw was about five yards from the door, curled up in the classic folded-legs configuration that meant it was no longer a problem. Just to be on the safe side, however, she monitored it for life signs with her Kawaguchiya XZ7700 SpydaSkan. Dead as the proverbial hammer. Next.

  Emily edged forward, prodding her way with a telescopic probe. Even if the spiders were all dead, getting caught up in a patch of web was still something to be avoided. The revolting stuff ruined any article of clothing it came into contact with, and as for hair … She shuddered. Scary she’d learned to cope with, but there was no real, permanent defence against yucky. As a stray wisp snagged the back of her hand and welded itself to her skin, making her whimper as she pulled it away, it occurred to her that a routine check like this should really be left to junior staff-a trainee, say. Valuable hands-on experience, and cheaper for the client, too. The only factor that put her off the idea was the likelihood that Erskine would jump at the chance and quite possibly thank her afterwards, and she wasn’t sure she could stand that.

  Seven more dead spiders. They’d made a thorough mess of the computers. Atkinsonii are classed as
sentient-intelligent, and some veterans of the trade reckoned they were considerably brighter than most non-humanoid monsters once you got to know them, though their world-view was crude and violent and their love of country-and-western music was predictable but sad. One thing on which all the authorities agreed, however, was that they were extremely literal-minded, which meant that once they started hearing rumours about humans building a worldwide web, they abandoned their usual habitat in dark, remote forests and started making a serious nuisance of themselves. Monitors and CPU’s cracked open and with their wiring wrenched out littered the floor, and there was even a small, rather droopy proto-cobweb made out of modem cables slung between two desks in the far corner of the room.

  Seven plus one makes eight; Emily stopped, and flicked the beam of her torch through the shadows. Another feature of Atkinsonii behaviour was their urge to crawl under something to die, so she knelt down and looked under the desks and tables. Nothing. She killed the torch beam and stood up, instinct ordering her to keep perfectly still. There had been nine quite distinct blips on the Everleigh, but so far she’d only found eight folded-up corpses. Of course, there was no way anything could have survived in there while it was pumped full of cyanide gas, and the Everleigh had also shown her nine perfect flatlines. At the back of her mind, a memory flickered: something about Atkinsonii acrodontis being able to slow down its bodily functions to simulate death and fool a scanner. These weren’t acrodontes, they were pachythoraces, but maybe the research was incomplete … Emily’s intestines prickled, and she called up the floor plan of the room in her mind’s eye, with special reference to the distance and vector of the doorway. If her theory was correct, it’d be nice to live long enough to write a short piece for the Gazette about it.

  ‘Hello.’ Bloody Erskine’s voice. ‘Are you all right in there?’ One of the few really useful things she’d learned in second year at college was that, ninety-five times out of a hundred, you make more noise going Sssh! than the person you’re trying to silence. Something about sibilants carrying further than dentals, labials and all the other types of articulated sound. She tried to remember if the article she’d read had mentioned whether pachythoraces understood English. Atkinsonii acrodontes were only fluent in Spanish, she recalled, while leptopodes were bilingual in Gujarati and (by some extraordinary quirk of evolution) Esperanto. But if the article had mentioned pachythoraces, she couldn’t remember what it’d said—

  ‘I said hello,’ Erskine bellowed. ‘Is anything the matter? Can I do anything to help?’

  Dropping dead would be a good start, Emily thought. She did her best to edit his voice out of her mind. Was that a very faint rustling sound, such as two-inch leg bristles might make as they rubbed against the leg of a desk? Needless to say, she’d gone in without anything even remotely resembling a weapon, unless you counted the Mordor Army Knife (one of whose more puzzling features was the lack of any kind of cutting edge; she could only assume that the users it was designed for had perfectly good claws and teeth for that sort of thing, so there wasn’t any call for a blade). Unleashing a twelve-foot collapsible ladder under its rapidly moving mandibles might disconcert the bastard for a moment or so, but would that be long enough for her to reach the doorway? Probably not. The RSPCA website recommended clapping your hands loudly and saying ‘Boo!’ as a humane, non-lethal alternative to blowing Atkinsonii to hell with rocket-propelled grenades, but she had a suspicion that the recommendation wasn’t the product of what she’d consider as valid hands-on experience. Emily took a very careful step backwards, and felt something brush against her shoulder.

  Nuts, she thought.

  The stickiness and strength of Atkinsonii gossamer makes it a revolting nuisance when there aren’t any live spiders around. In a spider-rich environment, it’s just a tad more significant. With exquisite delicacy, she moved her shoulder until the tendril started to tug on the fabric of her jacket. If, as was often the case, the web-builder was sitting up there in the centre seat of its creation, the slightest twitch on a strand would tell it everything it needed to know about her. That meant wriggling out of the jacket could prove fatal. On the other hand, staying put until the spider did its regular patrol was a guaranteed trip to Eternity. Under those circumstances, it was probably worth taking the risk that pachythoraces didn’t know English—

  ‘Help,’ Emily whispered. ‘I’m stuck.’

  ‘You’re not, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’ The surprise in Erskine’s voice was very mildly flattering, implying that he was reluctant to believe that a skilled, highly trained professional like her was capable of getting into trouble of any kind. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes:

  Pause. ‘But surely, if you recalibrated the XZ7700 to scan for gossamer fragments, like it says you should do in the office procedures manual, it ought to have picked up any stray bits of web, and you shouldn’t have got caught. In which case, I don’t understand how—’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I didn’t do that,’ she hissed. ‘Reconwhatsit the scanner. I should’ve done but I forgot, all right? Now, at the back of the tool kit there’s a zip-up compartment with a neon-acetylene cutting torch in it. I want you to adjust the flame till it’s—’

  ‘No, there isn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the zip-up pocket. No torch. There’s half a roll of extra-strong mints, if that’s any use.’

  It was a nasty blow, but Emily had handled worse. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Prime three more concussion grenades and pitch them in here, and then I want you to come in and haul me out while the spider’s counting stars. You’ll need to watch out for—’

  ‘Spider?’

  ‘Hphm.’

  ‘You mean there’s still one left alive in there?’

  It was the constant, cumulative bombardment with snippets of the blindingly obvious that wore you down in the end. ‘I have reason to think so, yes. Now prime the bloody grenades like I told you, and then—’

  ‘We’re out of grenades. Sorry.’

  Wince. Erskine was quite right, of course. She’d only brought four, and they’d all been used up in the preliminary strike. ‘All right,’ she whispered. ‘So what have you got? Cattle prod? Taser? Come on, for crying out loud, there must be something in the bag we can use, even if it’s just a poxy magic sword.’

  Pause; then, ‘No, terribly sorry, nothing like that in here. This is very bad, isn’t it?’

  If she had a knife, of course, or better still a pair of scissors, she could cut the cloth away from around the gossamer and be home and dry. Scissors. Scissor attachment on the Mordor Army Kn —

  Emily froze. Now that definitely was a movement, somewhere in the darkness above her head. A tactical disaster, but at least she knew where the horrible thing was, whereas there was a chance it hadn’t made her yet, or why hadn’t it—?

  Another movement. A big one, this time, and so fast that she never really had any chance of reacting to it. Swinging on a gossamer rope like five Siamese-twin Tarzans, the Atkinsonii swooped down on top of her. She felt its boot-leather belly slam into her face, breaking her nose. Without thinking, Emily cringed away, right into the thick of the gossamer net, which held her like a magnet. She filled her lungs with air for a really loud, pathetic, betraying-everything-she-stood-for B-movie scream, but she never made it that far. By the time her larynx had adjusted itself to the required shape, the spider had bitten her head off.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  For Amelia Carrington, magic meant never having to eat celery.

  Today, she’d ordered in steak and kidney pudding, followed by chocolate mousse with whipped cream, with a bottle of good claret to help it down. Her father had always maintained that she ate like a man, and maybe he was right. Regardless of that, she had the satisfaction of knowing that her daughter couldn’t borrow her clothes because they’d be too tight.

  She ate a mouthful of suet and gravy, and smil
ed. Cecily, whose weakness was cream cakes and boxes of Thorntons chocolates, relied on Effective magic to undo the ravages of comfort eating. That was all well and good, in its way. Everybody who met her saw a lithe, slender figure, so the reality didn’t matter; the only way she’d be found out would be if she happened to stand in front of an imp-reflecting mirror, an annoying Chinese invention that shows you as you really are, and at the last count there were only seven of them in London, one of which snuggled at the bottom of Amelia’s handbag. True, another one was built into the top of Carrington’s boardroom table, disguised as a really good French-polish finish: Amelia had paid top dollar for it at the J. W. Wells bankruptcy sale, partly because it was always helpful to know exactly who (or what) you were negotiating with, but mostly to annoy her daughter. Even so: Effective magic was a perfectly adequate response to Cecily’s weight problem. Good, straightforward professional thinking, if a little deficient in imagination.

  Amelia, on the other hand, used Practical magic. It was a hell of a business, since every atom of surplus bulk had to be magically removed; it took a long time, and the process was inherently dangerous. Magic is strictly Boolean in its applications, and it’d be far more logical to lose two pounds by dematerialising a kidney than by stripping off small deposits of adipose fat. The point was, though, that whereas Cecily just looked thin, her mother really was thin. Another excellent reason for buying JWW’s conference table.