The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  - But the other thing about spectral warriors is that, in spite of their unnatural genesis and peremptory growth, they’re still basically just soldiers. And what does a soldier do, arriving at a new and unfamiliar posting to find a nice girl handing out tea and sarnies? Cut her head off and jump up and down on her mangled trunk? Don’t be silly.

  The spectral lance corporal nodded, and slowly extended his new, unused arm. Straight away, Emily wedged the flask top into his hand and poured him some tea.

  ‘Bit of a cock-up with the catering,’ she said cheerfully, ‘so you’ll all have to share. Also, there’s no sugar, but I do have some sweeteners.’ From her bag she produced a little green plastic tube. She held it over the cup and pressed the lid, discharging little white pellets. ‘Pass the cup along,’ she said, ‘and dig into the sandwiches.’

  The lance corporal took a swig of tea and handed the cup on, then reached for a sandwich. For thirty seconds or thereabouts, Emily was kept busy refilling the cup and passing the plate round. Then, orderly as a line of dominoes, the spectral warriors slowly keeled over and crashed to the floor.

  Lucky, she thought as she stepped over the lance corporal, that she’d forgotten to return the tranquillisers to store after she’d dealt with the dragon in the National Lombard in Fenchurch Street. Lucky, too, that they’d been the extra-strong concentrated variety-one tablet guaranteed to knock a fully grown manticore out cold for six hours, or your money back and your funeral expenses paid. It was, of course, only a temporary expedient. Sooner or later, they were going to wake up again, and chances were they’d have headaches and be extremely cross with her. Only one thing to do, therefore. She tugged a warrior’s sword out of its scabbard and pressed it against his throat. Spiders, she thought.

  The sword point wasn’t very sharp; designed for strength, presumably. A needle-sharp point would just snap off if you stabbed it against armour. A certain degree of force seemed to be called for.

  Right, Emily thought. But there’s no tearing hurry. Soon as they start showing signs of waking up, I’ll kill the lot of them. Just not yet.

  She looked round at the table, where she’d put down the empty plate. It was loaded with fresh sandwiches. She wasn’t surprised. The thermos was probably full again, too. If you’re planning on keeping a prisoner long-term in a sealed, doorless room, something of the sort is pretty much essential. So, she thought; even if I do slaughter the lot of them, I still won’t be getting out of here in a hurry. And Colin Gomez has got the rest of the teeth I pulled out of that dragon, and even if the same trick works a second time, there’s only about four tranquillisers left. Yup, still screwed. Just checking.

  In which case, why bother scragging the warriors after all? If they came to and killed her, they’d be doing her a favour. Otherwise, all she had to look forward to was staring at the walls and eating sandwiches, until such time as Colin Gomez figured out a way of killing her that she couldn’t counter. Wouldn’t take him long, but why hang about? Only delaying the inevitable. And besides, she’d died before, and it didn’t seem to have done her any harm—

  Yes, but that was because Frank Carpenter had been around with his Portable Door; and that was only because Mr Sprague was paying him to save the insurance company the cost of a heavy claim. But Mr Sprague wasn’t there any more. Would Frank be along to undo her death if he wasn’t getting paid for it? Well, probably he would, if he found out that she’d died. But she couldn’t rely on that. Psychology of young men in love: he calls, leaves messages, no reply, so he assumes he’s been issued with the regulation cold shoulder and slouches away to wallow in misery for a bit, until some other girl comes along. Somehow, the human race has contrived to find this sort of thing unbearably romantic for thousands of years. As far as Emily was concerned, it wasn’t even slightly romantic, just damned inconvenient.

  Let the spectral warriors kill her, then? No, absolutely not. Quite apart from the being-dead aspect of it, she was buggered if she was going to let the spiders win. Over her dead body, in fact.

  In that case, Emily was either going to have to kill the spectral warriors in their sleep or find a way out of there. She considered the options. The mass-slaughter option had one thing going for it, a quality which the alternative so demonstrably lacked. It could be done. After all, she told herself, it’s not as if they’re people. They’re teeth; and if a tooth starts hurting, you trot along to the dentist and have it drilled or pulled. A simple, guilt-free occurrence, and you don’t tend to get the ghosts of all your past teeth standing over your bed rattling their fillings at you in your sleep and giving you nightmares.

  Correction: they were teeth. Not any more, though.

  Emily swore, threw the sword across the room and sat down on the floor. All right, she asked herself, what would Captain Picard do in her shoes? Well, obviously he’d engage the warriors in meaningful dialogue, convince them that it was in all their best interests to work together to find an effective but non-violent way of getting out of there, probably involving reconfiguring the biostatic matrix on some handy electronic gadget he just happened to have with him—

  Not like that in real life, of course. True, the tube of tranquillisers had been a lucky break. But tranks were the sort of thing she tended to carry about, being an essential commodity in her line of work, so it wasn’t the same at all, not cheating. And apart from them, everything else she had about her person was just so much useless junk. Look at it, for crying out loud (she started turning out her pockets onto the bare stone floor).

  Lipstick. Compact. Three ballpoint pens, two non-functional (but if we could somehow reverse the polarities, we could rig up some kind of interplexing beacon …). Kleenex. The silver paper from a roll of Polo mints. A comb. A small cardboard tube.

  Emily blinked.

  A small cardboard tube: the sort of thing you find behind the lavatory door when an inconsiderate person’s been using it before you. Apart from the Blue Peter crew and maybe the Andrex puppy, nobody on earth could have a use for one. Except that she’d seen one just like it-absolutely just like it-in the hands of Frank Carpenter.

  Come off it, she said to herself. One bog-roll tube looks pretty much like another. And just because one specimen contains the Portable Door, that doesn’t mean they all do. It’s just a cardboard tube I must’ve picked up somewhere, though why on earth I’d want to do that—

  She remembered.

  The dragon; the same one whose teeth were cluttering up the floor she was sitting on. The dragon who’d turned a billion dollars into ash, but who died guarding this plain brown cardboard cylinder. Now what would a creature devoted to acquiring and hoarding items of great value want with the core out of a toilet roll?

  Hardly able to breathe, Emily poked about inside it with her fingertip. There was something in there all right. Something rubbery, thin, rolled up. It could, of course, turn out to be the board from a travelling Ludo set. Only one way to find out.

  But it couldn’t be the Door, because Frank had it. He’d used it to get in and out of Sprague’s office, and when she’d come through into this room it had stayed behind with him, she was absolutely sure about that. Besides-what was she thinking?- if this was the dragon’s tube, it had been there in her pocket ever since she’d killed the bloody thing, so Frank couldn’t have been using it ever since. The whole point was, there was only one Portable Door in existence.

  Only—

  She poked a little further, and a corner slid out. Gripping it between forefinger and thumb, she pulled gently. The roll of thin plasticky sheet fell into her lap. She picked it up, and it unrolled like unruly wallpaper.

  The Portable Door.

  That was the moment when one of the spectral warriors grunted and stretched in his sleep, inadvertently kicking Emily’s ankle. She jumped, nearly dropped the Door, juggled with it, caught it and hugged it to her.

  Right, she thought. Sod this.

  Facing the wall, she pressed the plastic sheet against it. It attached itself immediat
ely, and she watched as it seemed to soak into the plasterwork, leaving behind a rectangle of thin black lines that grew steadily thicker and darker as she looked at them. When is a wall not a wall? Funny you should mention that.

  Curiously enough, her door handle was different: an anodised aluminium lever instead of a round brass knob. She reached out, closed her eyes and gripped it. It felt faintly warm.

  Where do you want to go today?

  Emily hesitated. Out of here probably wasn’t a precise enough answer. Home? No. Gomez’s office, so I can smash his face in? Tempting, but on balance, not a good idea. I can go anywhere I like, she thought: Rome, Lisbon, Marrakesh—

  None of the above. The question, she realised, had only one answer because, of course, the Door didn’t belong to her. And however nice it was to fantasise about what she’d do if she had a Door of her very own, the fact was that she didn’t. Unless, of course, there really were two of them.

  Only one way to find out. Wherever Frank is, Emily thought, and pushed down the handle.

  Colin Gomez looked at his watch. He was pleased at how miserable he felt. It showed character, he thought, to be so upset about killing Emily Spitzer. There had been times over his long years in the profession when he’d wondered if he was growing callous, insensitive to the human cost of doing his job. He’d remember old Mr Kropatchek, the Butcher of Lombard Street, his first boss, a man utterly devoid of compassion and scruple, and just occasionally he wondered if he was turning into him. Apparently not. Marty Kropatchek wouldn’t have thought twice about unleashing a whole lower jaw’s worth of spectral warriors in Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Eve if there’d been money in it, and he certainly wouldn’t have agonised about it after the event. Colin, by contrast, had been moping about the place ever since he’d emptied the bag and closed up the basement wall, to the extent that he’d hardly managed to get any work done since. So that was all right.

  Twenty minutes: more than enough time for twelve spectral warriors to slaughter one unarmed girl. He sighed and rose from his chair. Better go and tidy up the mess.

  There was the small matter of getting rid of the spectral warriors, but he knew how to do that. From the bag on his desk he picked out a dozen teeth. An equal number of warriors from separate sowings will invariably attack each other and, being implacable and perfectly matched, wipe each other out. Expensive-Colin was still dreading what his partners were going to say about it at the next finance meeting; they might even insist that the cost of the warriors should come out of Colin’s share of next quarter’s profits: bitterly unfair, he’d just have to be stoical about it-but effective, and right now he just wanted the whole wretched business done and out of the way.

  Down the stairs, through the big door, down the hateful, vertiginous spiral staircase, never intended to accommodate someone of his weight and girth. He was well aware that the issue of why he’d been kept in the dark about the Portable Door was still entirely unresolved; something else to worry about. It hadn’t been a good day, in any respect.

  In the top half of the Parker-Shaw Uniface, there’s a little sliding panel you can draw back and look in through, the sort of thing you get in prisons. Colin opened it, threw in the handful of teeth, and quickly slammed it shut. Another great merit of the Parker-Shaw is its soundproofing.

  He gave it five minutes, more than enough time, then opened the door and went through.

  Not a pretty sight. Spectral warriors can take an obscene amount of damage before they die, and Colin Gomez wished he’d had the sense to put his Wellington boots on before coming down. A quick headcount; twenty-four of them, only a few still attached to necks. So that was—

  Twenty-four.

  It was one of those moments when you feel completely hollow, like an egg sucked by a well-instructed grandmother. Two dozen heads; he swallowed hard and inspected them, one by one. It was hard to be sure, the state some of them were in, but he was fairly certain that none of them was Emily’s.

  He slumped against a wall. Marvellous, he thought. Nigh on three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stock in hand gone down the toilet, and to crown it all, the girl would appear to have escaped.

  The practice of magic requires exceptional powers of mental discipline, and these stood Colin Gomez in good stead as he leaned there gazing at the mess. They made it possible for him not to think of what Amelia Carrington was going to say when he told her that he’d failed, again. That was just as well, since the blind panic would have paralysed him, and he needed a clear head—

  He looked down at something lying near his feet on the floor. No pun intended, he thought.

  Somehow-God only knew how-that bloody Spitzer girl had escaped. Furthermore, she now knew for stone-cold certain that he was out to get her. The chances of her being at her desk at nine sharp tomorrow morning were, therefore, slight. But if she’d done the sensible thing and put as much distance between herself and him as is possible on a curved planet, how the hell was he going to find her and finish the job?

  He slid down the wall and sat in something sticky. Amelia Carrington might just let him off with a reduced profit share and a severe bollocking, if he brought Emily’s head in a jar along to the meeting. Otherwise, he was done for. And to think, he’d actually been feeling guilty about having her put down. Old Marty had been right. No place for bleeding hearts in the magic business.

  Talking of which: he identified the sticky thing he’d been sitting on, picked it off his trouser seat and threw it away.

  Finding a competent magical practitioner who doesn’t want to be found is the next best thing to impossible. There are wards and cloaks, invisibility charms and stealth locks, and even Krnka’s Mirror can be banjaxed if you’re savvy enough. Emily Spitzer hadn’t had much experience in that area, but she was resourceful, a quick study, and highly motivated; and if she had access to the sort of kit she’d have needed to get out of a self-sealing basement—

  Kit like— oh, to take an example completely at random, a Portable Door.

  The gurgling noise that the shit makes as it closes over the top of your head is quite unmistakable, and Colin Gomez heard it very clearly. What hurt him most of all was the unfairness of it; because he’d always been a good soldier, a true believer, and in spite of that-maybe, God help him, because of it-he’d been singled out to take the fall in whatever loathsome scheme Amelia Carrington was brewing up. Really, it was more than flesh and blood could bear. It was almost as bad as working for Enron.

  Hell hath no fury like a true believer forced to revise his basic assumptions. Standing in the gore-flecked Carringtons basement with the blood of spectral warriors trickling down the inside of his trouser leg, Colin Gomez made his grand renunciation and declaration of war. It was a noble moment and he couldn’t help feeling rather good about it, but once the emotion had thinned out a bit he also couldn’t help noticing how frail his position was. Such resources as his position as a partner in the firm afforded him couldn’t be relied on for much longer; Amelia would be after him first thing in the morning, wanting to be told that Emily was dead, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to fend her off for very long. After that, he could only think of one possible ally he could call on. Assuming (sardonic little laugh) that he could find her.

  Well. Maybe he couldn’t, but a phone signal probably could. Carringtons equipped their staff with Kawaguchiya NP6530s, total network coverage guaranteed everywhere; deep in the Earth’s magma layer, the craters of the Moon, even railway tunnels. And one thing a girl of Emily’s generation would never ever do, no matter what the circumstances, was switch off her mobile.

  Colin Gomez took out his pocket diary and looked up her number.

  Better, they say, to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

  Bullshit, Frank reflected, staring at the wooden rafters of the cabin. That’s a bit like saying it’s better to fall off the roof of a very tall building than to have stayed on the ground.

  A man can get sick of the sight of rafters, even hi
s own. But there was nothing else to claim his attention, so he carried on staring.

  Love, he thought. What a bloody silly idea. Investing all your hopes, the whole point of living, in someone you’ve only just met, who you know next to nothing about, is on a par with putting all your money on a racehorse you’ve picked out of the list in the morning paper using a blindfold and a pin. Before he’d met her-well, his life had been empty and meaningless, but it hadn’t really bothered him so terribly much. He’d had the Door, after all; he’d amused himself with sightseeing trips through time and space, earned a little money, done a little collateral good. Now, having loved and lost, he had no interest in metaphysical tourism. No point. The landscape in the background might change, but he’d stay the same. Even the best holiday is no fun if you can’t stand the person you go with.

  To have loved and lost; it made it sound like a competition we loved, I lost. If so, then in love as in freestyle knife-fighting, the silver medal isn’t worth having. Alternatively, to have lost your love sounds like sheer carelessness. (Where did you have it last? Have you checked all your pockets?) He hadn’t mislaid it. It hadn’t fallen down the back of the sofa. He’d offered her his heart, and she’d trodden on it.

  That’s me, Frank thought. Squashed-rather than brokenhearted, with nothing to do and no place to go. That’s not tragic, not even sad. It’s just plain silly.

  He still had the Door. No job running errands for Mr Sprague, though. But so what? The world was full of opportunities. Other insurance companies, for example. Pick one at random-that was how he’d first met George Sprague-make them an offer they couldn’t refuse, back to work. And who knew; maybe the genuine girl of his dreams was already there waiting for him, wherever there proved to be. More than one of her, even. For all he knew, they were queuing up somewhere, like people waiting to audition for The X Factor. Of course, he could stay exactly where he was, staring at rafters until he died of old age. Or he could get up off his arse, unfurl the Door like Columbus’s sails, and go exploring for strange new worlds.