Differently Morphous

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  “Er . . . yes. I’m taking you back to the Ministry. I’m sure we can find a job for you to do, and it’ll pay well. It’ll just have to be something that doesn’t involve . . . you know. Using magic powers.”

  Alison felt another surge of emotion trying to force its way out through her tear ducts, but she held it back and concentrated on the road ahead. “Mr. Hesketh?”

  “Yes?”

  “This man and woman came to our house and told me I had to come to the special school,” she recounted. “Why would they do that if I didn’t . . . didn’t actually have magic powers?”

  Adam jerked his head towards a slim manila folder lying on the back seat, which the monastery records office had been only too happy to part with. “I had a quick look at your file. It was something to do with you scoring one hundred percent on all your high-school exams.”

  “And that’s supernatural?”

  “Well. Unusual for your school district, but not necessarily supernatural, I suppose. Can you remember if anything else was going on around the time the two agents came to your house?”

  Alison thought hard. “We were watching Interstellar Bum Pirates. Me and Mum. It was the episode where Captain Blaze has to take Zoobster to the space vet. The people came and knocked on the door three minutes and twelve seconds after the first ad break ended, after Blaze says—”

  “Um, I wasn’t actually talking about the precise moment that . . .” began Adam, before interrupting himself thoughtfully. “Alison, can you tell me, what was the last car we overtook?”

  Alison sat up straight, energized by being asked a question she could answer. “It was a white one.”

  “A white what? Toyota, Nissan?”

  “Oh. I don’t know the names. It was a normal car, though.”

  “What was the registration number?”

  “B745 GPP,” reported Alison.

  “What about the car before that?”

  “Black, K125 RXL.”

  “Do you think you could tell me what the last ten signs we passed said? In order, from latest to earliest.”

  Alison began dutifully reciting a complex combination of letters and numbers relating to exits, A roads, and B roads before Adam realized that he had no way of knowing if she was correct. He silenced her by reaching out and covering her eyes with one pudgy hand.

  “The dashboard,” he said. “There’s a grille for the air conditioner in front of you. How many slits does it have?”

  “Twelve,” said Alison, her prompt enthusiasm beginning to drift into confusion.

  “And what’s the song title currently showing on the CD player?”

  “ ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.’ ”

  The driver behind blared their horn as Hesketh’s car began to drift from the lane, so he hastily put both hands back on the wheel and shook his head, as if to dislodge his distracting thoughts. “Right. That’s interesting. I think I see what caused the confusion now. What you’ve got there is an eidetic memory.”

  “A what?”

  “Er, photographic, they used to say. Remembering everything even from a single glance. It’s very impressive. Didn’t you ever notice that other people couldn’t do that? Remember things as well as you?”

  “No,” said Alison. She turned away, gazing out of the window. “Mum always just told me to stop showing off.”

  Adam winced. “Well, trust me, it’s unusual. It’s just, you know, not magical. Totally, totally mundane.”

  Alison, who had been gradually rising in her seat as confidence straightened her back, suddenly crumpled back down. Moments later, she started crying.

  Adam drummed his fingers on the steering wheel even harder, pretending not to have noticed. When the sobs didn’t seem to be abating, he reluctantly leaned over, opened the glove compartment, and found a balled-up tissue. He held it out for her to take, noticed that her eyes were screwed shut, awkwardly withdrew it, then came to a decision and started helpfully dabbing her nearest cheek.

  The car behind loudly made its presence felt a second time, and he grabbed the wheel again, letting the tissue fall into Alison’s lap. She stared at it blankly, her heaving sobs gradually sniffling to a close.

  “I’m sorry,” she quavered. “I just wanted to do my best. I thought I’d been given something special, and I could use it to do some real good. For everyone. And now . . .”

  “W-well, it’s not that great, having a magical infusion,” said Adam quickly, one hand hovering uncertainly an inch above Alison’s nearest shoulder. “They’re not even useful, sometimes. There’s a guy in Nottingham with a magical infusion that makes his hair and fingernails glow, but it only works in direct sunlight. That’s the only thing it does. Having an eidetic memory’s way more useful than that.”

  Alison removed a few trails of snot with a fast swipe of the tissue along her upper lip. “What kind of work will I have to do for the Ministry?”

  “Oh. Erm. I’m not sure. This doesn’t happen very often. It will pay well, like I said, but it won’t be anything terribly glamorous, I’m afraid . . .”

  “I don’t mind,” said Alison, sniffing away the last of her tears and meeting the gaze of the angry red brake lights of the car in front. “I’ll do it. And I’ll do my absolute best.”

  “Like, really, really unglamorous,” said Adam uncomfortably. “Like, making-coffee-for-everyone sort of level.”

  “Then it’ll be the best coffee they’ve ever had at the Ministry.”

  Adam smacked his lips and grimaced. “I’d, er. Set my goals a little higher, if I were you, Alison.”

  03

  Before arriving at the house, Henry Wollstone had prepared a list of activities he intended to indulge in during his holiday, arranged in order of preference. Catching up on his reading had been at the top, followed by completing one of the jigsaw puzzles the cupboard under the stairs had mysteriously accrued. Much lower down had been things like “learn to cook” and “go outside.”

  “Socialize with slime monsters from beyond the veil of time and space” was not something that it had occurred to him to add, but if it had, it would have been pretty low down. Probably just under “weed the garden.” Which, ironically, was the only task that had actually been accomplished so far.

  He reflected on this unhappily as he sat in the kitchen, unwilling as he had been to entertain his guests in any room with a carpet. He stared at them across the breakfast table, clutching a mug of heavily sugared tea in his white-knuckled hands.

  The creatures had taken on narrow, upright forms, both reaching a height of about four feet to be able to politely peer over the tabletop with their gelatinous smiley faces. Henry had already deduced that the contrived little eyes and mouths the creatures were wearing didn’t have anything to do with how they saw and spoke.

  “Sowwy about the house,” said the pinker one on the left, in a voice like a pair of gumboots being pulled out of thick mud.

  “It’s fine,” said Henry instantly, firing out the words like elastic bands.

  “Would oo wike us to cwean it?”

  “No, no, no, it’s fine.” He still hadn’t dismissed the possibility that he was being toyed with and that the furniture was going to be hurled aside at any moment to commence his painful digestion.

  One of the blobs gave a sad little fart to fill the awkward silence. “We have made a mess of this, have not we.”

  “W-well, yes,” said Henry. In the lull, his thoughts had momentarily been hijacked by his attempts to mentally calculate the cost of a complete recarpeting. “I mean, no. Well. Erm. What exactly are you . . . people doing here?”

  “We would wike to wequest asywum,” said the right-hand blob, with a rehearsed air.

  “Asylum?”

  “Yes.”

  He glanced from one to the other. “In my parents’ kitchen?”

  “No, no, no,” said the left-hand blob. “In or wowld.”

  “Our world,” repeated Henry. “Right. That makes more sense, doesn’t it. So . . . you�
�re from another world?”

  “Yes,” admitted a blob.

  “Both of you?”

  The two emoticons exchanged an artificial glance. “Yes.”

  “Ah.” Henry’s fingers drummed rapidly upon his tea mug.

  One of the blobs’ “faces” vibrated with a little burbling noise that Henry decided was probably supposed to be a sigh. “Wouwd oo consent to just kiwwing one of us?”

  Henry choked on his tea. “What?”

  “Evewy time one of us cwosses into your wowld, they get kiwwed by a human,” said the left blob.

  “We sense their pain acwoss the wealms,” added the right.

  “So we came in two so maybe oo could just kiww one of us and the other one could expwain the situwation.”

  “I-I don’t want to kill either of you!”

  “Weawwy?”

  They both leaned closer. The possibility of sudden digestion returned violently to the forefront of Henry’s mind. “Uh! Not presently anyway. I don’t know why your other friends were killed. Maybe they took someone by surprise.”

  “So we can have asywum?”

  As it always did at work, the opportunity to kick a matter upstairs did wonders for Henry’s anxiety. “Oh! Well. That’s not really up to me. I think you’d have to go to the Home Office.”

  “Could oo take us there?”

  “You . . . want me to take you to my leader?” He winced at his own words.

  They leaned closer still. “Yes, pwease.”

  The relaxing weekend with the cupboard of jigsaw puzzles was feeling further and further away by the second. Henry sighed. “And I suppose you want to go right now?”

  “No no no,” said the right blob. “In or mowning. We have to gather the others.”

  In his mind’s eye, Henry had a foreboding metaphorical vision of a first raindrop hitting the ground with a thud. “Others?”

  04

  After a punishing car journey, and a one-night stay in a travel inn that was even more so, Adam Hesketh and Alison Arkin arrived at Westminster.

  Alison took only a mild interest in the great old buildings that filed past the passenger window. She had never been to London, but she had glimpsed enough images of it from television throughout her life to be almost completely familiar with it already.

  Instead, she focused on her new career prospects. Her initial despair at being expelled from the monastery had gradually transmuted into hope, followed eventually by excitement. She had done her best to grill Hesketh throughout the trip down but hadn’t learned much more beyond the spectrum of awfulness the Ministry coffee went through.

  The car pulled up and parked in a space on the corner of Barton and Great College Street, outside a door in the perimeter wall around Westminster School. But as Alison left the car, Adam started walking away from the door with measured steps, counting his way along the rough stone wall.

  He stopped at a section that looked, to Alison’s eyes, identical to every other, then knelt and pushed a nondescript brick until it clicked. A large section of nearby wall extruded an inch with a clunk, then slid gracefully aside.

  Alison peered curiously around Adam’s bulk and saw a narrow space within the wall itself and a set of stone steps leading down. “Wow,” she said, almost involuntarily. “So it really is, like, a secret ministry.”

  “Yep,” said Adam proudly. “Based out of secret catacombs under Westminster Abbey. Apparently John Dee built them when he had the sanction of Elizabeth I.”

  Alison glanced behind them. “Don’t you think it’s a little out in the open?”

  Adam examined the row of terraced houses that ran along the opposite side of the narrow street and their blatantly uncovered windows. “Um. I don’t think it’s ever been an issue. But let’s get inside. Quickly.”

  The narrow tunnel promptly widened as it went below street level, until Adam and Alison were descending a grand, gently curving staircase, lit by old-fashioned electric lanterns in what had once been torch sconces. Power was supplied by black cables running along the upper walls, arranged into artful curves and patterns in accordance with the theme.

  “You’ll probably have to live onsite, at least at first,” said Adam. “There should be plenty of spare sleeping quarters. Time was, everyone who worked at the Ministry had to live here as well. It was a secrecy thing. If anyone wanted to leave, they’d have to go through a memory-suppressing ritual, and apparently magicking someone’s brain without side effects is a lot more miss than hit . . .” He stopped when he realized that Alison wasn’t following. “Oh, uh, they don’t do that anymore. Obviously. Most of the staff live offsite now. And there are freelance agents all over the country for local matters.”

  Alison remained where she was, one leg frozen in the act of descending the next step. “Why the change?”

  “Well, eventually the Ministry realized that they didn’t need to be so strict about keeping all this secret. Turns out the supernatural keeps itself secret, mostly. People normally ignore it. Automatically, sort of. I heard a quote once: ‘The easiest secret to keep is one nobody wants to believe is true.’ ”

  “Sorcerer Majorus William Winsome-Smythe in 2007,” recited Alison, now descending the steps slightly ahead of Adam.

  “Er . . . yes.” He buried his hands in his trench coat pockets. “We’ll talk with Ms. Lawrence about your job after the morning meetings are finished. You can hang around in my office until then.”

  “Does that really work?” said Alison, mentally sorting through the many wild and occasionally horrifying things Brother Burling and his fellows had taught her about magic and those infused with it. “Getting people to ignore it?”

  “Well. Do you remember, about ten years ago, that major invasion of England by supernatural forces that very nearly resulted in total human extinction?”

  Alison frowned. “No?”

  “There you go, then. Worked perfectly on you.”

  She was about to press the matter when they reached the bottom of the staircase, and the words died in her mouth. Unable to forget nineteen years of sights and sounds, she was instantly fascinated by anything truly new.

  Despite being underground, and carved out of the solid rock, the Ministry’s interior was far from squalid. The ceilings were low, but the yellowish walls were far apart and as smooth as glass. The floor was covered in a dark red carpet thick enough to suck affectionately at her trainers, with strands artfully teased out of the fabric to form intricate swirls and patterns with occult significance.

  Alison found herself drawn to one of the regularly spaced pillars that supported the ceiling. Its lower half ballooned outwards, and every square inch of it was painstakingly carved into an endless miniature fresco of strange, vaguely humanoid figures linking hands and tentacles. She touched it lightly with her fingertips and slowly circled around, taking in every detail, until she found herself face to belt with someone dressed in the same kind of rough brown cassock that Brother Burling had worn.

  Alison slowly peered up into the depths of a pair of flaring nostrils. The owner had none of Burling’s trademark twinkly eyed amiability. He (or she, for all the baggy robe could indicate) possessed a completely shaven head, including the eyebrows, a tattooed symbol that Alison had last seen on a section of carpet approximately ten feet away, and the offended boggle-eyed stare of the most devout fundamentalist faced with the most foul-smelling heresy.

  Adam was about to grab her by the arm and pull her back, but lost faith in the idea at the last moment and opted instead to pinch a single fold of her sweater’s sleeve between thumb and forefinger. “Er. Sorry,” he said to the offended monk. “She’s with me. It’s her first day.”

  Without changing expression, the monk gestured their head in a manner that was halfway between an acknowledgment and a warning, then glided away.

  “I’d stay away from the monks,” muttered Adam as he furtively steered her in the opposite direction by a single thread of her top. “They used to run all the occult-defense st
uff by themselves. Had to officially join up with the government about a century ago, and some of them still haven’t gotten over it.”

  They passed under a stone archway centrally decorated with an ancient carving of a sword, and the corridors suddenly became narrow again. The carpet remained the same and there was still the occasional pillar, but now water coolers and potted plants appeared at regular intervals. Alison glanced through a couple of open doors as they went past and saw tired-looking men and women in ordinary shirtsleeves working at desks and pondering complex flow charts.

  She suddenly turned, stopping Adam in his tracks. “Was it the ash cloud?”

  “Whuh?”

  “That invasion thing you were talking about. Was that it? Ten years ago we had to stay indoors for a whole week because this fog came down all over the country. They said it was a volcanic ash cloud. Was it? Not?”

  Adam lowered his eyes, smiling uncomfortably. “No. It wasn’t an ash cloud. I can’t tell you much more; I was still at the monastery at the time. They made us bunker down in the crypts for the week. All I know now is that an Ancient tried to invade our world.”

  Alison continued walking. “They never taught me anything about that,” she said, with absolute certainty.

  “Well, it’s not something people around here like to be reminded of,” said Adam. “Apparently it was a bad time for the Ministry, and it had to go through some big changes. Partly why the whole secrecy thing was toned down. Once it became obvious that the general public were happy to believe whatever explanation they were given. Here we are.”

  Adam’s office was simultaneously gloomily and severely lit by the single lantern in the center of the ceiling. The two desks and three chairs looked to Alison like they had come from cheap flat packs, from what little of them she could see beneath scattered documents and manila folders. There was a curious contrast in the different types of clutter on display: the paperwork in the nearer half of the room was arranged into piles that covered nearly the entire desktop and most of a chair, probably with the intention of filing them at some point, while the files scattered across the far half of the floor seemed to have been idly tossed aside when finished with.