Ollie nodded, then spoke quietly. “OK, maybe you would believe me,” she said, then she noticed Dan’s gun was held in his lap, pointing at her.
“Mindy, explosive rounds,” he said. Ollie watched the weapon spin and illuminate.
“Wait, don’t shoot!” she protested. The pendant on her necklace began to glow. She slapped a hand down on it, pinning it against the top of her chest. “I escaped. I’m not one of them, I was trapped there. I was a prisoner.”
“Whose prisoner? Where were you?” Dan asked. “And why?”
The pattern of lines on Ollie’s skin paled. “I don’t know. I never saw him. Not directly. And I don’t know what I did. All I remember is that place. The darkness.” She swallowed. “And the things hiding in it.”
“That could be anywhere,” said Dan, holding the gun steady.
‘The Malwhere’ was a generic, catch-all description for any one of a few hundred known - and countless thousand still unknown - Hell-like dimensions. Better minds than his probably knew more about the science – parallel dimensions, bubble universes, or some such – but when it came to direct, boots on the ground experience, Dan was better placed than most to comment. ‘Dark and full of scary shizz,’ was a description that could be applied to any one of a few dozen Malwhere dimensions.
“I heard a name once,” said Ollie, still eyeing the gun. “Kalayguy?”
Dan’s grip tightened on the gun. “Kalaechai?”
“I don’t know. Yeah, maybe,” Ollie said.
It made sense. Dan had never had any dealings with Kalaechai directly, but had heard enough stories to know he was the kind of guy likely to have a giant tentacle-monster on the payroll. Hell, maybe he was a giant tentacle-monster himself. You could never tell with Malwhere types.
There was some loony underground cult dedicated to him somewhere in the city. Dan vaguely recalled having kicked one of them in the nuts a few years back.
“Purple robe,” he said, as the memory snapped into focus.
Ollie frowned. “Huh?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Dan. “So, you escaped Kalaechai? You got out of the Malwhere, just like that?”
Ollie nodded, then shifted her hand to reveal the pendant. It was a fairly simple-looking circle of metal with something a bit like a clock-face in the center. It was no longer glowing, but there was a faint aura about it that suggested the possibility of glowing wasn’t yet off the table.
“I found this. It helped me get out.”
Dan held out a decidedly-female hand. “Toss it over.”
Ollie’s hand clamped down on it again. “I can’t. If I take it off, they’ll find me. It hides me. From them.”
That, too, made sense. Dan had heard of similar tech before, although hadn’t seen a whole lot of it up close. Of course, there were the usual suspects who considered such things to be magical artefacts, but he’d found that the only real difference between magic and technology was a healthy dose of skepticism and a modicum of common sense. One universe’s sorcery was another universe’s dishwasher.
Dan relaxed his grip on the gun, but didn’t put it away. “So, the amnesia thing’s bullshizz?”
“Well, I mean… Kind of,” said Ollie. She nodded, sheepishly. “Yeah.”
Dan allowed himself a half-smile of satisfaction, and made a mental note to rub Nedran’s face in that at a later date.
“So, what are you? Really, I mean,” Dan said.
Ollie looked down at herself, the back at Dan. “I’m this.”
“Right,” said Dan, dragging the word out. “And yet you somehow don’t know how your bladder works.”
Ollie’s eyes flitted around the ruined room, as if making sure no one else was listening. She lowered her voice, just in case. “It was different there,” she whispered. “Everything was… It was different. I was this, I was the same as this, but… different.”
Dan puffed out his cheeks. “Thanks for the explanation. Real helpful,” he said.
“Was it?” asked Ollie, brightening suddenly.
Dan shook his head. “No.”
“Oh,” said Ollie. “Well, I suppose I was… lighter. Like, kind of untouchable.”
“Non-corporeal,” said Dan.
“Does that mean lighter, like, kind of untouchable?” Ollie asked.
“Pretty much.”
“OK, then yes, I was that, then.”
Dan leaned back in his chair a little, but the abuse it had taken at the hands – and, more significantly, the buttocks – of the Igneon made it slouch uncomfortably to one side, so he let it rock him forwards again.
Ollie’s story made enough sense to be viable, but was vague enough to mean it was impossible to corroborate. If he believed her, then she was a lifelong prisoner of one of the big name Malwhere Lords, but had somehow managed to escape his domain in the tiny window of opportunity presented by some idiot with a robe and a fancy dagger.
If he didn’t believe her, there was no saying what she was.
She yawned. This took her by surprise, and seemed to cause her some concern. “I didn’t do that on purpose,” she said, pointing to her mouth. “Am I dying? Does that mean I’m dying?”
Dan shook his head, sighed, then holstered his gun. “No, you ain’t dying. You’re tired, that’s all.” He studied her for as long as it took him to roll his tongue around inside his mouth, then click it against his teeth. “So, all this is new to you? You had no physical form?”
“I looked like this,” said Ollie, pointing to herself. “But I felt different. I can’t really explain it.”
“I know someone who might be able to,” said Dan. He pushed back his hat and scratched his head. “But it’s late, and he’s not the most reliable guy in the world come night time.”
A thought struck him.
He stopped scratching.
“My face,” he said.
“Huh?”
“You didn’t mention my face.”
Ollie’s eyes darted up from his chin to his forehead. With his hat back, the entire patchwork quilt or rot and decay was on full display. “Your face?”
“Yeah. Most folks have something to say about it.”
Ollie nodded slowly. “Oh,” she said, then her brow knotted. “Why?”
Dan blinked, the dry lids scraping across his milky eyes.
Ollie was doing that smile-and-frown thing again, the one that suggested she had failed to understand a joke that everyone else was already laughing at.
“You know,” said Dan, clearing his throat. “I never thought to ask them.”
He stood up. The breeze drifting in through the hole in the wall swished his coat around his legs. The car alarm had stopped its squawking now, and the only sound was the regular drone of the Up There engines.
“We’ll figure out what to do about you tomorrow,” said Dan. He gestured to the door leading out into the reception area. “Now, you should get some rest.”
“Oh, OK,” said Ollie, then she yawned, closed her eyes, and promptly fell asleep.
Dan stood watching her for a minute or more. She was sitting bolt upright, her eyes closed, her breath coming in short, shallow snorts.
“Shizz. Even I find that creepy.”
He looked back over his shoulder at the hole in the wall.
Finally, he sighed. “Should have left her in that warehouse,” he muttered. He took of his coat, gave it an experimental sniff, then draped it over her.
He wandered around the trashed office, half-heartedly sweeping up some pieces of Shornack’s enforcer with his foot, before he realized he couldn’t tell where the Igneon ended and the wall debris began.
With a grunt, he picked up the old filing cabinet and stood it upright. Then he scooped up a few armfuls of paperwork, squashed it all into a ball, and shoved the whole lot into the top drawer. It began to expand almost immediately, so he found a large chunk of Igneon – part of a foot, he reckoned – and placed that on top of the paperwork, pinning it down.
He wrestled the drawe
r closed. This took some effort, and he worried that if the squeaking didn’t wake Oledol up, the swearing might. Neither did.
He opened the far less stiff bottom drawer and found a clean shirt. Or relatively clean, compared to the one he was wearing, anyway.
Looking around to make sure Oledol wasn’t watching, he hastily changed. Had Ollie been awake, she would have seen the vast expanse of his back, the flesh withered and riddled with decay. He’d been in shape once. In a lot of ways, he was still in shape, although quite what that shape was was difficult to say.
He worked the buttons on his shirt. It was tricky, but took slightly less effort than last time. The fact he was getting used to the new arm was irritating him. It was ridiculous. A woman’s arm. It would have to go. First opportunity, it would have to go.
Turning, he looked over the office. His efforts to tidy it hadn’t made a whole lot of difference. At best, it had gone from ‘completely destroyed’ to ‘completely destroyed, but with an upright filing cabinet’, which didn’t really seem to merit the effort.
He gazed out over the city for a while, the wind playing across his face. A flying sphere rose up outside the building, a number of lenses all rotating to fix on Dan and his missing window. A Paparazzoid. Dan hated the things. Always scouting the city for scandal. It was the only way the rolling news channels could fill their schedules.
“Fonk off,” he told it. “Nothing to see here.”
Eventually, after it had ogled the damage for a while, the Paparazzoid flew off, leaving Dan staring out at the city again.
Finally, he lowered himself back into his seat, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and crossed his arms across his chest.
“Yep,” he mumbled, raising his feet onto the wreckage of his desk. “Should have left her in that fonking warehouse.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ollie woke up screaming.
Looking back, she wouldn’t be able to say why she was screaming exactly. The memory of the dream – or the dream of the memory, maybe – slipped away quickly, leaving her with only a general imprint of some cold and shapeless dread.
Startled, Dan jumped in his seat. Thanks to the missing armrest, he fell sideways out of the chair and landed unceremoniously on the rubble-strewn floor, one hand already reaching for his gun.
Ollie stopped screaming. She was pressed back in her chair, ducking, her arms hooked over her head for protection. As Dan got to his feet, he spotted her eyes, hidden behind her arms and her curtain of dark hair. They darted anxiously around her, searching for something horrifying. The glow from her necklace made them sparkle and dance.
“Hey, easy, kid,” Dan said. He held up a hand in what was supposed to be a soothing gesture, then caught sight of the nail polish and winced with irritation.
Yep. That would definitely have to go.
Ollie’s eyes fixed on him, but the glow from her pendant didn’t fade.
Dan swapped hands. “You’re OK. It’s OK. Nothing’s going to hurt you. Relax.”
From out in the reception area came a series of metal clangs. Ollie jumped up with a yelp, and spun around. Her chair – the only fully-intact piece of furniture in the office, flew across the room and smashed against the wall.
“Son of a…” Dan began, before ending the sentence in a gruff sigh. “Look, just calm down. It’s nothing. It’s just Artur.”
The clanging came again, more insistent, this time.
“Alright, alright, give me a minute!” Dan bellowed.
The clanging stopped, but it did so in a way that managed to sound quite begrudging. It also somehow conveyed the sense that the clanging could resume at any moment, so someone should probably get their fonking skates on.
Ollie’s head went from the door to Dan and back again on an apparently endless loop. Her breathing was short and erratic, her hands no longer over her head, but clenched in fists by her sides, instead. They trembled, the knuckles turning white as the pendant around her neck continued to glow.
Dan thought about making a grab for the thing. He could tear it free and toss it out through the hole in the wall before she figured out what he was doing.
Correction. He could probably do all that. If he couldn’t, though…
He remembered the Igneon. It was hard to forget him, of course, what with bits of the guy still covering almost every available surface.
Dan decided against grabbing for the necklace.
“Look, you had a dream, that’s all,” he said. “It happens. It doesn’t mean anything. You’re OK. You’re safe.”
He looked around at the trashed office.
“You know. Relatively speaking.”
Ollie’s breathing slowed, just a little. Her hands remained in fists, but the whiteness faded around the knuckles.
“I was back there,” she said, quietly. “I mean… I thought I was back. With them.”
“Like I said, it was just a—”
The clanging resumed. Dan clenched his jaw, rolled his eyes, then headed for the door. “Can’t even give me two seconds,” he muttered, storming through into the cramped reception area.
Technically, it wasn’t really a reception area. A reception area most likely required a receptionist, and this room didn’t have one. It didn’t even have a reception desk, which was probably the bare minimum requirement for a reception area.
There was a small table in the corner, but it was mostly for eating at, and not really used for even light secretarial duties.
The contents of the room also included four threadbare chairs with the stuffing poking out through the padding lined up against the opposite wall, and another filing cabinet. All the actual paperwork was in the filing cabinet next door, so Dan tended to use this one for storing other things. The definition of ‘other things’ was as far-reaching as the name suggested, and the drawers were now so crammed with random junk that he couldn’t open the top one all the way without the whole thing falling forwards.
There were three hooks on the wall beside the door that led out to the staircase. Two of them had identical hats and coats hanging from them. The third was empty. Dan took off his hat and tossed it towards the third hook. It missed and flopped onto the floor, which did his mood no favors, at all.
The only other item of interest in the waiting room was a landscape painting. It showed the sea. A lot of sea. In fact, it was basically nothing but sea. The bottom half of the picture was dark blue. The top was gray cloud, with the occasional hint of electric blue shining through. Engine blue.
A ripple on the surface of the ocean suggested something large was moving beneath it. Quite how large, exactly, was difficult to gauge, what with the lack of anything else in the image to compare it to, but it was large enough.
The clanging came from behind the painting. Dan unhooked the frame and set it on the floor, propped upright. With the painting removed, a rectangle of much cleaner wall was revealed. In the center of that was a small metal door, set back so it was flush with the wall itself.
Part of the door was smooth and glassy, like a screen. Dan tapped a finger against it and a numerical display illuminated. The clanging came again, more insistently this time, as he keyed in the code.
“Alright, alright, give me a—”
Dan barely had time to lean back before the door flew open. He felt the wind as it swung past, narrowly missing his nose, and then a flailing blue shape, no more than six inches high, landed on his face and punched him right in the eyeballs.
“Ow. Fonk. Cut it out, Artur,” Dan grimaced, grabbing for the little figure. It lashed out with a foot, kicking him on the thumb, then scampered around the side of his head and bit him on the ear.
“Keep me waitin’, will ye?” the little figure spat. “Aye, sure, well, we’ll see about that.”
Had Dan been familiar with the languages and dialects of the planet Earth, he might have remarked long ago that Artur’s accent was quite unmistakably Irish. As he wasn’t even aware of Earth’s existence, though – never mind that of
the Emerald Isle – he thought nothing of it.
Finding handholds in the crags of the much larger man’s rotten skin, Artur clambered up onto Dan’s head, found his balance, then began jumping up and down, driving the heels of his bare feet into Dan’s skull with each bounce.
“Every fonking time,” Dan muttered. He jerked his upper body sharply to the left, and Artur was launched across the room.
“Aah, ye big feckin’ shoite,” the little man managed to holler, before he thumped against the wall and fell what would, to him, have been a not inconsiderable distance to the floor.
Dan rubbed the top of his head. He spotted Ollie standing in the office doorway. She was looking down at the fallen Artur, who lay flat on his back, dead.
Or pretending to be, at least.
“There’s a little man,” Ollie said.
“Hoi! Less o’ the cheek, ye fat cow,” said Artur, still pretending to be dead, albeit much less convincingly now. “Who’re ye calling little?”
Ollie frowned. He was definitely little. She didn’t know much, but she was confident she was right on that one.
He was dressed – or possibly trapped – in a rectangular paper suit. Holes had been cut for his head and arms, and the bottom had been ripped off so his bare legs could poke through. He looked like he was wearing a deeply unflattering dress.
There was writing on the front of the ‘outfit’ but Ollie couldn’t read it. Had she known more about the world, she might have recognized it as an old envelope, but she assumed it was some kind of cultural thing, instead.
The man himself was a light greenish-blue, with a darker green beard that grew like moss across his chin. He had long hair (or long for his size, at least) tied in a loose ponytail, and eyebrows that well and truly stamped their authority across the upper part of his face.
“Come on, get up,” said Dan.
Artur didn’t move, other than to relax in a way designed to make him look even deader. “I can’t. Ye killed me, ye big fecker.”
Dan’s shadow fell on the little man. He raised a foot twice as big as Artur’s entire body. “That can be arranged.”
Dial D for Deadman: A Space Team Universe Novel (Dan Deadman Space Detective Book 1) Page 5