‘There,’ shouted Pierre, his voice barely carrying over the sound of girders clanging against one another. A barrel - presumably of oil - exploded somewhere outside. ‘The stairs on the other side. See them?’
I confirmed that I could indeed see them, though it was hard with the rising levels of smoke. Some of it billowed out through jagged holes in the roofing, but the rest crowded like clouds above and around us.
We scurried across the factory floor trying not to touch anything, for all the metal was scorching hot and much of the wood was aflame. The cotton, great reels of the stuff, had been completely burned to ash. My eyes stung something fierce and my lungs felt full of grime and tar. My head started to dance a waltz all to itself. But we dared not leave the confines of the crumbling walls in case any Diamond Rats were patrolling the courtyard, mopping up survivors. As if to confirm our concerns two gunshots rang out, quick and sharp. A second later a window shattered high above, showering the space a little to our left.
It took a minute of moving slowly, walking in a painful squat, before we reached the opposite side of the room and where Pierre had been pointing. A banister still stood, though flickers of flame danced across its bronze reflection, and through its bars we could see down to where the rickety stairs met a corridor - a corridor that Pierre assured me led to Viola’s armoured interrogation room.
We descended the flight of stairs two steps at a time, doubling back on ourselves. On the third from bottom my shoe went cracking through the step’s middle, the plank snapping in half and cutting up my ankle with its splintered teeth. I heaved my foot back out as Pierre rushed past, wincing and trying to be thankful that I’d rolled my socks up as high as I had. The cotton felt sticky; I could only hope that the cut wasn’t too bad. God knew when I’d next go to a time period with a proper doctor.
Pierre motioned for me to be quiet as I approached the corridor. He was standing to one side of the entrance and listening in, so I did the same on the other. Now that I was concentrating on something other than my aching foot, I could hear a couple of people arguing.
‘On the upside, sounds like they haven’t got in yet,’ Pierre whispered. From up the corridor came the sound of a boot colliding with metal, followed by an miserable groan. ‘On the downside, most likely neither will we.’
I dared to peek around the corner. At the end of the narrow corridor, lit only by a single lantern, which miraculously hadn’t yet smashed to pieces on the dusty concrete floor, were two men shaped like upturned pears. Each had arms capable of crushing my head like an even softer exotic fruit. And whilst one of them wielded nothing more terrifying or sinister than a lead pipe torn straight from the wall beside him, the other brandished a revolver - a six-shooter that looked almost comically similar to the ones in the old western movies my dad used to love watching so much. I had a sudden flashback of lying down on the carpet of the living room in my old family home, my father sitting on his leather couch behind me, the two of us daydreaming our way into his dusty old fantasy worlds where men were men and you wouldn’t be seen dead without a waistcoat. My mother tutting from the kitchen whenever a gunslinger blasted half the town away, yet smiling to herself all the same.
I don’t know what Pierre was doing while I was away with the fairies, but the only thing capable of tearing me from the soft comforts of my memories was a Habborlain Cotton & Yarn sign, about six foot by four, springing free from half of its nuts and nails and coming to a swinging, crashing, screaming stop about twenty feet above us. A screw bounced off my forehead and a shower of plaster and mortar embedded itself in my hair. The sign groaned as if in warning.
‘I’m just going to come out and say it: I think it might be time to head home,’ said Pierre, nodding towards the two goons.
‘Seriously? This is when you throw in the towel?’
‘Well, I’m happy to wait here while you dispose of our friends down the corridor.’
‘Why me? You’re the one with grenades.’
Pierre looked down at the two hand grenades bundled together in his arms. He looked at me, open mouthed.
‘What? You want me to kill them? Are you insane? I’m a concierge, not a soldier!’
‘Just to be clear - you’re the one taking me across the multiverse, sending us back - or forward, I can’t even tell anymore - to World War One to get some grenades for your homicidal Victorian lady friend, and yet you won’t even save her life with them. And you call me insane? Don’t pretend like you didn’t know what she’d use them for. At least now you can justify it to yourself as a sort of… pre-emptive self-defence.’
Pierre looked down at his grenades as if pondering them for the first time. Then he looked back up at me.
‘No,’ he said.
‘How about…’ I tried, spacing each word out as if it would somehow change the magnetism of the dubious moral compass on which we stood, ‘…you light one of them, and then, in order to make sure we don’t blow up and die, I throw it away for you? Wherever seems the safest. For us, I mean.’
Pierre bit his lip. ‘Well… that would just be self-preservation, wouldn’t it? Can’t have us blowing up so far from home.’
‘Or anywhere close to home, for that matter. But exactly. And anyone caught in the blast… well, they shouldn’t be here anyway, should they? Not our fault if they want to go around blowing things up and shooting people and then get themselves hurt in the process.’
‘But we wouldn’t be deliberately hurting anyone, right?’
‘No, of course not. I’d just throw it where it makes most sense to go. And accidents happen when you set about the destruction of a cotton mill, don’t they? Like grenades going off, I imagine.’
This makes a twisted form of sense, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?
Pierre nodded, slowly. For the first time since I’d approached the reception desk of Le Petit Monde, Pierre had misplaced the confident, commanding gleam that always seemed to dance in his eyes. He looked nothing but lost, which seemed all the more wrong for a man so adept at traversing worlds. He nodded a little while longer, then suddenly pulled the pin from one of the grenades and held it out to me at arm’s length.
I stared at it.
‘I don’t want it,’ I said in a squeak.
‘What do you mean, you don’t want it? Just throw it!’ hissed Pierre, his accent growing thicker and more French by the syllable.
‘But it might blow my hand off!’ I tried swatting it away. ‘Argh! Think: what would Preston do?’
With a groan Pierre closed his eyes and, wincing heavily, threw the grenade down the corridor, if only to have nothing more to do with it. With all the bangs and clangs of the collapsing factory neither of the thugs noticed it rolling towards their feet.
‘Oh God, I’m a murderer,’ moaned Pierre, sliding down the side of the wall. He had one hand on his face and the other gripping the second grenade a little too tightly for my liking. ‘The Council of Keys will make sure I never step foot in a hotel again…’
I had an idea. It wasn’t a brilliant one but it was an idea all the same, and it seemed to do the trick.
‘Oi, dickheads,’ I shouted. The two thugs broke from their fixation upon the impenetrable metal door and stared at me with faces more blank than untouched snow on a Christmas morning. The goon with the pipe mouthed ‘What the…’ and the one with the revolver raised its muzzle towards me. As I darted back behind cover there came a deafening boom and part of the wall, specifically the part where my head had been only half a second before, disintegrated into a thousand pieces.
‘See, you don’t need to feel guilty,’ I shouted to Pierre, who looked up at me from between his fingers. ‘Now it’s self-defen-’
If I’d considered the first boom to be deafening then the explosion that followed wasn’t just loud - it swallowed all the rest of the sound around it and belched the concoction out ten-fold. It was born out of nothingness, then suddenly it was all there was; a blunt full stop of noise, a condemning punctuation. It came, it
went, and all there was in between those two short moments was an almighty sullen thud. Silence did not follow it alone; it came hand in hand with a harsh, high-pitched ringing that drilled far into the depths of my brain. A great wave of dust and rubble had washed down the corridor after, and through the dissipating cloud I could see Pierre lying on his side, trying to dig the sound back out of his ears with his fingers.
‘Pierre, are you alright?’ I asked. My words sounded all thick and far away, as if formed of bubbles in a swimming pool. He took my hand and I pulled him to his feet. Luckily, neither of his ears were bleeding.
‘Are you alright?’ I repeated. ‘I mean, the corridor… the thugs?’
Much to my surprise, Pierre swatted my concern away.
‘Don’t worry about it. In fact, good riddance!’
‘Erm… Are you sure you didn’t get hit by something in the blast?’
‘What?’ Pierre looked at me, confused. ‘No, of course not. Why, I just had a little think when I was rolling around on the floor, unable to hear anything. It’s a wonder what deafness can do for your contemplation, I tell you. And I realised: I made a choice. Thanks to that choice, in another world I didn’t throw the grenade and we both died. All things considered, I’d rather be in this one.’
I let this strange perspective settle in my head.
‘So essentially what you’re saying, is that we can kill whoever we want, whenever we want, because we can always justify it as ensuring that it doesn’t happen elsewhere instead?’
‘Yeah, I think we should ditch this train of thought at the next available station,’ said Pierre, furrowing his brow. ‘It’s pretty horrible, really. Just think - somewhere out there is a world where you’ve killed everyone on the planet.’
‘True, but so have you.’
‘It probably all evens out, I suppose.’
‘I suppose it does.’
A huge chunk of plaster dropped down from the roof of the corridor, sending even more dust and grime our way. Something red, sticky and gelatinous dripped after it, which Pierre and I tried not to look at.
We climbed over the bricks and rubble, making an overt but unspoken effort to avoid anything that bore a passing resemblance to a body part. I’m pretty sure that an eye watched me from a dent in the wall, and something which may once have been an arm reached out from a pile of stones in the corner.
At the corridor’s end stood the door, or rather, stood a jagged metal hole where once a door had been. The rest had been blown inwards, I presumed, because for the life of me I couldn’t see through all the dust and smoking metal. All except the outside door handle, which had been removed so quickly and viciously that it now occupied a position in the brickwork halfway down the hall.
We stepped through the gap of bolts and iron shards, not knowing what mess to expect inside.
‘Stay back you rotten shit-bags, or I’ll shoot your dicks off,’ came the unhinged yelling of Viola. She came into focus, a wild look in her eyes and yet another pistol pointed in our direction. The interrogation room was split in half, with prison bars running down and along its middle. Viola had barricaded herself behind them.
‘Jesus, is that any way to greet a friend?’ asked Pierre, holding his hands up. I did the same, just to be careful. I was barely a friend, after all.
Viola lowered her gun and laughed. It was an uncharacteristically ethereal sound, like a marshmallow angel sitting on a cloud. Then her face turned to stone.
‘Which one of you cretins blew up my door?’
I pointed at Pierre. I didn’t even mean to, it just came naturally.
‘My hero,’ she whimpered, tilting her head and fluttering her eyelashes in a sarcastic swoon. An enormous smile spread across Pierre’s face.
‘Ahem,’ I said, from off to the side.
‘Ah yes,’ said Pierre, remembering himself. ‘As requested: one grenade. The other… has been put to good use already. May we have Mr. Webber’s briefcase?’
Viola rolled her eyes and walked to the back of her cell. I approached the bars, my heart growing light at the thought of finally going home, finally going back to something that might resemble normality, no matter how brief that something might be, but drew my hands back quickly, discovering that the bars were coated with a blend of flaking rust and a mysterious, sticky brown glue. Pierre waited patiently, studying the remaining grenade.
The side on which Pierre and I stood was fairly barren, or at least had been before the metal door had gone cascading through it, digging a trench through the concrete floor and cracking the wall on the opposite side. A couple of plain wooden chairs sat with their backs to the wall facing the bars, and that was about it in regards to the furniture. The cell, on the other hand, was much more interesting.
Across the back wall were a variety of metal cabinets in a range of shapes and sizes; one of them was open, and inside I could make out thumb-screws and pliers, ice-picks and knives. A frayed rope hung from the inside of the door, and another dangled from one of the pipes running overhead. A bucket of water - or at least what I hoped was water - rested in the far right corner. There was a table to the back and left, on which sat a spanner and my briefcase - scuffed but otherwise no worse for wear. And in the centre of the cell, unspeaking and motionless, was the thief, his scarf coiled round his shoulders and his arms tied around the back of his chair. Blood had caked all down the front of his white shirt - his black jacket had been unzipped to the bottom - and his face was slumped against his chest like a drunk. There was something familiar about him… but I couldn’t put my finger on what is was. Had I passed him in the hotel somewhere - perhaps the lobby, perhaps the restaurant - and not given him a second glance?
Viola picked up my briefcase, tapping her blunt nails against its leather as if debating whether or not to hand it over. But then she returned to the bars.
‘Here you go, sweetie. Time to go-’
Before any of us could believe what was happening, the thief was up and out of the chair. His ropes dropped to the floor. Like a blur he covered the length of his cell, one hand wrapping the scarf around the lower half of his face and the other snatching at the briefcase in Viola’s hand like a viper launching a deadly strike.
‘Watch out!’ yelled Pierre, jumping out of his own chair and wielding his grenade like a club.
But it was too late. The thief tore the briefcase from Viola’s complacent grip and swung it back with enough force to send her head crashing into the iron bars. She slumped to the floor, dazed and breathing faintly, a trickle of blood running from her forehead.
He picked up her gun, which had skidded across the floor, and pointed it towards me.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked me, backing further away into the cell. It sounded as if he was putting on a deliberately gruff voice. A single black eye looked out from above his scarf. ‘Why in God’s name do you still follow me?’
‘What do you mean, what am I doing?’ I said, bewildered. ‘I’m not the one running around the multiverse with another man’s briefcase! Give it back!’
‘Jesus. None of the rest were as stubborn as you, you know that? Go back to your world and get on with the rest of your life, for crying out loud. Have a rest of your life, for that matter. Stop chasing after… this.’
‘But it’s important!’
‘No, it was important. Now, get away from the bars.’
Pierre and I did as he said. The thief rummaged through his pockets, looked alarmed, and then picked a key from off the table where my briefcase had been.
‘There’s nowhere to go, sir,’ said Pierre. ‘There’s no door to go through. Too many holes,’ he added in a whisper, pointing at the gate of the cell.
‘Come on, Pierre, you know better than that,’ said the thief, and walked over to the cabinets. With an awkward, tumbling click the door to one of the cabinets swung open, and through it came a gust of dry heat and the sound of birds chirping.
‘Please don’t follow,’ he said, bending to fit through the ca
binet’s frame. ‘Really. Just go back home - there’s a whole world waiting for you there.’
‘Yeah, well hell’s got a room waiting for you, you pigeon-livered wagtail,’ came a voice from the side of the cell. Viola had come around. She drew out a second pistol from the back of her trousers and swung its muzzle in the direction of the thief.
‘Viola, no!’ shouted Pierre, but to no avail.
As the thief slammed the cabinet door behind him, two bullets went screeching through its thin metal. One rattled around the inside of the cabinet until it came to a morose stop; the other went rocketing out the other side and ricocheted off the concrete wall.
Viola approached the cabinet and kicked it, for good measure.
‘For God’s sake, now what do we do?’ I asked, running my hands through my hair.
‘Buggered if I care,’ said Viola, unlocking the cell door and stepping into our half of the room. ‘I’ve got a reputation to rebuild, not to mention a factory. Grenade,’ she added, her hand outstretched.
Pierre handed the explosive over, and then she was gone through the hole in the metal door. Pierre looked down the corridor after her, then walked into the cell with me.
‘Well?’ I opened the cabinet door, half expecting a new world to be waiting beyond. It wasn’t. ‘What do we do next? Where do we go from here?’
Pierre shrugged. ‘Maybe we go home,’ he said.
‘Oh no, we’re not stopping here. We just blew some people up, for God’s sake. You want that to be for nothing? Or shall I send that complaint to your superiors? Maybe I’ll write a bad TripAdvisor review to go with it.’
‘You wouldn’t dare.’
‘Try me. This whole escapade was your idea, remember.’
‘Fine. Fine. Tell you what. This time we’ll do it your way, how about that?’
‘My way? What’s my way?’
‘Aside from moping about and forming unhealthy attachments to portable items of storage, you mean? You asked me why we didn’t just go to where the thief was going to turn up and catch him by surprise. Well, now you’ll get that chance.’
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