The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

by Douglas Adams

  Kate's telephone, which was the next thing he turned his attention to, was answered by a machine when he tried to ring it. Her voice told him, very sweetly, that he was welcome to leave a message after the beep, but warned that she hardly ever listened to them and that it was much better to talk to her directly, only he couldn't because she wasn't in, so he'd best try again.

  Thank you very much, he thought, and put the phone down.

  He realised that the truth of the matter was this: he had spent the day putting off opening the envelope because of what he was worried about finding in it. It wasn't that the idea was frightening, though indeed it was frightening that a man should sell his soul to a green-eyed man with a scythe, which is what circumstances were trying very hard to suggest had happened. It was just that it was extremely depressing that he should sell it to a green-eyed man with a scythe in exchange for a share in the royalties of a hit record.

  That was what it looked like on the face of it. Wasn't it?

  Dirk picked up the other envelope, the one which had been waiting for him on his doormat, delivered there by courier from a large London bookshop where Dirk had an account. He pulled out the contents, which were a copy of the sheet music of Hot Potato, written by Colin Paignton, Phil Mulville and Geoff Anstey.

  The lyrics were, well, straightforward. They provided a basic repetitive bit of funk rhythm and a simple sense of menace and cheerful callousness which had caught the mood of last summer. They went:

  Hot Potato,

  Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.

  Quick, pass it on, pass it on, pass it on.

  You don't want to get caught, get caught, get caught.

  Drop it on someone. Who ? Who ? Anybody.

  You better not have it when the big one comes.

  I said you better not have it when the big one comes.

  It's a Hot Potato.

  And so on. The repeated phrases got tossed back and forward between the two members of the band, the drum machine got heavier and heavier, and there had been a dance video.

  Was that all it was going to be? Big deal. A nice house in Lupton Street with polyurethaned floors and a broken marriage?

  Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul. Now it was a few record royalties, a few pieces of trendy furniture, a trinket to stick on your bathroom wall and, whap, your head comes off.

  So what exactly was the deal? What was the Potato contract? Who was getting what and why?

  Dirk rummaged through a drawer for the breadknife, sat down once more, took the envelope from his coat pocket and ripped through the congealed strata of Sellotape which held the end of it together.

  Out fell a thick bundle of papers.

  Chapter 22

  At exactly the moment that the telephone rang, the door to Kate's sitting-room opened. The Thunder God attempted to stomp in through it, but in fact he wafted. He had clearly soaked himself very thoroughly in the stuff Kate had thrown into the bath, then redressed, and torn up a nightgown of Kate's to bind his forearm with. He casually tossed a handful of softened oak shards away into the corner of the room. Kate decided for the moment to ignore both the deliberate provocations and the telephone. The former she could deal with and the latter she had a machine for dealing with.

  “I've been reading about you,” she challenged the Thunder God. “Where's your beard?”

  He took the book, a one volume encyclopaedia, from her hands and glanced at it before tossing it aside contemptuously.

  “Ha,” he said, “I shaved it off. When I was in Wales.” He scowled at the memory.

  “What were you doing in Wales for heaven's sake?”

  “Counting the stones,” he said with a shrug, and went to stare out of the window.

  There was a huge, moping anxiety in his bearing. It suddenly occurred to Kate with a spasm of something not entinely unlike fear, that sometimes when people got like that, it was because they had picked up their mood from the weather. With a Thunder God it presumably worked the other way round. The sky outside certainly had a restless and disgruntled look.

  Her reactions suddenly started to become very confused.

  “Excuse me if this sounds like a stupid question,” said Kate, “but I'm a little at sea here. I'm not used to spending the evening with someone who's got a whole day named after them. What stones were you counting in Wales?”

  “All of them,” said Thor in a low growl. “All of them between this size...” he held the tip of his forefinger and thumb about a quarter of an inch apart, “...and this size.” He held his two hands about a yard apart, and then put them down again.

  Kate stared at him blankly.

  “Well... how many were there?” she asked. It seemed only polite to ask.

  He rounded on her angrily.

  “Count them yourself if you want to know!” he shouted. “What's the point in my spending years and years and years counting them, so that I'm the only person who knows, and who will ever know, if I just go and tell somebody else? Well?”

  He turned back to the window.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I've been worried about it. I think I may have lost count somewhere in Mid-Glamorgan. But I'm not,” he shouted, “going to do it again!”

  “Well, why on earth would you do such an extraordinary thing in the first place?”

  “It was a burden placed on me by my father. A punishment. A penance.” He glowered.

  “Your father?” said Kate. “Do you mean Odin?”

  “The All-Father,” said Thor. “Father of the Gods of Asgard.”

  “And you're saying he's alive?”

  Thor turned to look at her as if she was stupid.

  “We are immortals,” he said, simply.

  Downstairs, Neil chose that moment to conclude his thunderous performance on the bass, and the house seemed to sing in its aftermath with an eerie silence.

  “Immortals are what you wanted,” said Thor in a low, quiet voice. “Immortals are what you got. It is a little hard on us. You wanted us to be for ever, so we are for ever. Then you forget about us. But still we are for ever. Now at last, many are dead, many dying,” he then added in a quiet voice, “but it takes a special effort.”

  “I can't even begin to understand what you're talking about,” said Kate, “you say that I, we — ”

  “You can begin to understand,” said Thor, angrily, “which is why I have come to you. Do you know that most people hardly see me? Hardly notice me at all? It is not that we are hidden. We are here. We move among you. My people. Your gods. You gave birth to us. You made us be what you would not dare to be yourselves. Yet you will not acknowledge us. If I walk along one of your streets in this... world you have made for yourselves without us, then barely an eye will once flicker in my direction.”

  “Is this when you're wearing the helmet?”

  “Especially when I'm wearing the helmet!”

  “Well — ”

  “You make fun of me!” roared Thor.

  “You make it very easy for a girl,” said Kate. “I don't know what — ”

  Suddenly the room seemed to quake and then to catch its breath. All of Kate's insides wobbled violently and then held very still. In the sudden horrible silence, a blue china table lamp slowly toppled off the table, hit the floor, and crawled off to a dark corner of the room where it sat in a worried little defensive huddle.

  Kate stared at it and tried to be calm about it. She felt as if cold, soft jelly was trickling down her skin.

  “Did you do that?” she said shakily.

  Thor was looking livid and confused. He muttered, “Do not make me angry with you. You were very lucky.” He looked away.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I'm saying that I wish you to come with me.”

  “What? What about that?” She pointed at t
he small befuddled kitten under the table which had so recently and so confusingly been a blue china table lamp.

  “There's nothing I can do for it.”

  Kate was suddenly so tired and confused and frightened that she found she was nearly in tears. She stood biting her lip and trying to be as angry as she could.

  “Oh yeah?” she said. “I thought you were meant to be a god. I hope you haven't got into my home under false pretences, I...” She stumbled to a halt, and then resumed in a different tone of voice.

  “Do you mean,” she said, in a small voice, “that you have been here, in the world, all this time?”

  “Here, and in Asgard,” said Thor.

  “Asgard,” said Kate. “The home of the gods?”

  Thor was silent. It was a grim silence that seemed to be full of something that bothered him deeply.

  “Where is Asgard?” demanded Kate.

  Again Thor did not speak. He was a man of very few words and enormously long pauses. When at last he did answer, it wasn't at all clear whether he had been thinking all that time or just standing there.

  “Asgard is also here,” he said. “All worlds are here.”

  He drew out from under his furs his great hammer and studied its head deeply and with an odd curiosity, as if something about it was very puzzling. Kate wondered where she found such a gesture familiar from. She found that it instinctively made her want to duck. She stepped back very slightly and was watchful.

  When he looked up again, there was an altogether new focus and energy in his eyes, as if he was gathering himself up to hurl himself at something.

  “Tonight I must be in Asgard,” he said. “I must confront my father Odin in the great hall of Valhalla and bring him to account for what he has done.”

  “You mean, for making you count Welsh pebbles?”

  “No!” said Thor. “For making the Welsh pebbles not worth counting!”

  Kate shook her head in exasperation. “I simply don't know what to make of you at all,” she said. “I think I'm just too tired. Come back tomorrow. Explain it all in the morning.”

  “No,” said Thor. “You must see Asgard yourself, and then you will understand. You must see it tonight.” He gripped her by the arm.

  “I don't want to go to Asgard,” she insisted. “I don't go to mythical places with strange men. You go. Call me up and tell me how it went in the morning. Give him hell about the pebbles.”

  She wrested her arm from his grip. It was very, very clear to her that she only did this with his permission.

  “Now please, go, and let me sleep!” She glared at him.

  At that moment the house seemed to erupt as Neil launched into a thumping bass rendition of Siegfried's Rheinfahrt from Act 1 of Götterdämmerung, just to prove it could be done. The walls shook, the windows rattled. From under the table the sound of the table lamp mewing pathetically could just be heard.

  Kate tried to maintain her furious glare, but it simply couldn't be kept up for very long in the circumstances.

  “OK,” she said at last, “how do we get to this place?”

  “There are as many ways as there are tiny pieces.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Tiny things.” He held up his thumb and forefinger again to indicate something very small. “Molecules,” he added, seeming to be uncomfortable with the word. “But first let us leave here.”

  “Will I need a coat in Asgard?”

  “As you wish.”

  “Well, I'll take one anyway. Wait a minute.”

  She decided that the best way to deal with the astonishing rigmarole which currently constituted her life was to be businesslike about it. She found her coat, brushed her hair, left a new message on her telephone answering machine and put a saucer of milk firmly under the table.

  “Right,” she said, and led the way out of the flat, locking it carefully after them, and making shushing noises as they passed Neil's door. For all the uproar he was currently making he was almost certainly listening out for the slightest sound, and would be out in a moment if he heard them going by to complain about the Coca-Cola machine, the lateness of the hour, man's inhumanity to man, the weather, the noise, and the colour of Kate's coat, which was a shade of blue that Neil for some reason disapproved of most particularly. They stole past successfully and closed the front door behind them with the merest click.

  Chapter 23

  The sheets which tumbled out on to Dirk's kitchen table were made of thick heavy paper, folded together, and had obviously been much handled.

  He sorted them out, one by one, separating them from each other, smoothing them out with the flat of his hand and laying them out neatly in rows on the kitchen table, clearing a space, as it became necessary, among the old newspapers, ashtrays and dirty cereal bowls which Elena the cleaner always left exactly where they were, claiming, when challenged on this, that she thought he had put them there specially.

  He pored over the papers for several minutes, moving from one to another, comparing them with each other, studying them carefully, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, line by line.

  He couldn't understand a word of them.

  It should have occurred to him, he realised, that the greeneyed, hairy, scythe-waving giant might differ from him not only in general appearance and personal habits, but also in such matters as the alphabet he favoured.

  He sat back in his seat, disgruntled and thwarted, and reached for a cigarette, but the packet in his coat was now empty. He picked up a pencil and tapped it in a cigarette-like way, but it wasn't able to produce the same effect.

  After a minute or two he became acutely conscious of the fact that he was probably still being watched through the keyhole by the eagle and he found that this made it impossibly hard to concentrate on the problem before him, particularly without a cigarette. He scowled to himself. He knew there was still a packet upstairs by his bed, but he didn't think he could handle the sheer ornithology involved in going to get it.

  He tried to stare at the papers for a little longer. The writing, apart from being written in some kind of small, crabby and indecipherable runic script, was mostly hunched up towards the left-hand side of the paper as if swept there by a tide. The righthand side was largely clear except for an occasional group of characters which were lined up underneath each other. All of it, except for a slight sense of undefinable familiarity about the layout, was completely meaningless to Dirk.

  He turned his attention back to the envelope instead and tried once more to examine some of the names which had been so heavily crossed out.

  Howard Bell, the incredibly wealthy bestselling novelist who wrote bad books which sold by the warehouse-load despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that nobody read them.

  Dennis Hutch, record company magnate. Now that he had a context for the name, Dirk knew it perfectly well. The Aries Rising Record Group which had been founded on Sixties ideals, or at least on what passed for ideals in the Sixties, grown in the Seventies and then embraced the materialism of the Eighties without missing a beat, was now a massive entertainment conglomerate on both sides of the Atlantic. Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila. ARRGH! was also the record label on which Hot Potato had been released.

  Stan Dubcek, senior partner in the advertising company with the silly name which now owned most of the British and American advertising companies which had not had names which were quite as silly, and had therefore been swallowed whole.

  And here, suddenly, was another name that was instantly recognisable, now that Dirk was attuned to the sort of names he should be looking for. Roderick Mercer, the world's greatest publisher of the world's sleaziest newspapers. Dirk hadn't at first spotted the name with the unfamiliar “...erick” in place after the “Rod”. Well, well, well...

  Now here were people, thought Dirk suddenly, who had really got something. Certainl
y they had got rather more than a nice little house in Lupton Road with some dried flowers lying around the place. They also had the great advantage of having heads on their shoulders as well, unless Dirk had missed something new and dramatic on the news. What did that all mean? What was this contract? How come everybody whose hands it had been through had been so astoundingly successful except for one, Geoffrey Anstey? Everybody whose hands it had passed through had benefited from it except for the one who had it last. Who had still got it.

  It was a hot potato.

  You better not have it when the big one comes. The notion suddenly formed in Dirk's mind that it might have been Geoffrey Anstey himself who had overheard a conversation about a hot potato, about getting rid of it, passing it on. If he remembered correctly the interview he had read with Pain, he didn't say that he himself had overheard the conversation.

  You better not have it when the big one comes.

  The notion was a horrible one and ran on like this:

  Geoffrey Anstey had been pathetically naïve. He had overheard this conversation, between — who? Dirk picked up the envelope and ran over the list of names — and had thought that it had a good dance rhythm. He had not for a moment realised that what he was listening to was a conversation that would result in his own hideous death. He had got a hit record out of it, and when the real hot potato was actually handed to him he had picked it up.

  Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.

  And instead of taking the advice he had recorded in the words of the song...

  Quick, pass it on, pass it on, pass it on.

  ... he had stuck it behind the gold record award on his bathroom wall.

  You better not have it when the big one comes.

  Dirk frowned and took a long, slow thoughtful drag on his pencil.

  This was ridiculous.

  He had to got some cigarettes if he was going to think this through with any intellectual rigour. He pulled on his coat, stuffed his hat on his head and made for the window.

  The window hadn't been opened for — well, certainly not during his ownership of the house, and it struggled and screamed at the sudden unaccustomed invasion of its space and independence. Once he had forced it wide enough, Dirk struggled out on to the windowsill, pulling swathes of leather coat out with him. From here it was a bit of a jump to the pavement since there was a lower ground floor to the house with a narrow flight of steps leading down to it in the front. A line of iron railings separated these from the pavement, and Dirk had to get clear over these.