Earth, Air, Fire & Custard Tom Holt

by Earth, Air, Fire

  'Yes, but-' But what? Paul couldn't think of anything to say.

  'And then, when you'd finished with it, you went and stuck it in the Bank, where nobody but you could ever get at it again. So,' she went on, with a mild sigh, 'it's not like we had any choice in the matter. You put it there, you had to go and get it back. Thanks,' she added. 'Sorry for any inconvenience. Eat your cake, it's not nearly as revolting as it looks.'

  Paul looked at the plate lying on the bed beside him. 'No, thanks,' he said stiffly, 'it's had goblins in it. All right, so it's your Door, but why the hell couldn't you have told me, instead of having me killed like that? Have you got any idea how close I came to-?'

  'Well, I can't help it if you're not nearly as bright as I assumed you were. And besides,' she went on, 'if I'd come to you and said, actually, that was my Door, can I have it back, pretty please? Do you really expect me to believe you'd have just meekly handed it over?'

  'Yes.'

  'Really?' Mr Tanner's mum looked at him. 'I wouldn't, if I'd been you. Absolutely no way in hell I'd have given it back without a fight. But there we are, probably just as well we aren't all alike. Anyway, here's the Door and no harm done.'

  'No harm.' No harm, Paul thought; and he remembered for the first time what Mr Dao had told him, when he'd entrusted the Door to him for safekeeping-

  ('I should warn you,' Mr Dao had said, 'that you will be able to retrieve it one time only; once it has been withdrawn from our keeping, the Bank's standard terms and conditions clearly state that should you wish to return it to store, a standard administration fee will be payable.'

  'Oh,' Paul had said, thinking: Aggravating, but that's banks for you. How much?'

  'A lift.')

  - Which raised the question he'd faced three months ago, when he'd decided to put the wretched thing safely out of harm's way: was the Door the kind of thing that ought to be left lying around, practically begging every nutcase and psycho and wannabe Dark Lord to get his claws on it? Was it really a suitable present for a two-week-old baby, or wouldn't a nice bear or a box of building bricks be more suitable? But Mr Tanner's mum had strolled round, picked it up and tucked it down inside her profoundly intimidating goblin cleavage. Threat to civilisation as we know it or no threat to civilisation as we know it, Paul was buggered if he was going to try and get it back from there.

  Fine, he decided. Not my problem any more. 'So that's it, is it?' he said, suddenly feeling very tired. 'Because if you don't need me for anything else today, I think I'd like to pass out from shock and trauma for a bit.'

  Mr Tanner's mum nodded. 'You go ahead,' she said. 'I'll see myself out.'

  After she'd gone, Paul lay still and quiet on the bed for about ten minutes, then drifted into the kitchen to see if there was anything to eat. But the fridge was empty and so was the bread bin and the biscuit jar, and he didn't have the strength to trail down the stairs and yomp the fifty endless yards to the corner shop. Nothing else for it, therefore, but to drive a stake through his finer feelings and eat the slice of christening cake. It was sticky, bitter and tasted disconcertingly of sulphur, but it was marginally better than nothing at all. He pulled a face as he crunched up the last scraps of icing - rather like eating the chalk out of the little wooden tray under the blackboard back at school - and then it occurred to him to wonder what was likely to be on the menu at Mr Dao's place; nothing, followed by nothing with a null salad. The thought took away his appetite completely, and he lay on his back on top of the duvet (shoes still on; his mother would have had a fit) staring at the cracks in the ceiling plaster. Three times he'd been there now, not counting the banking trips with and without Benny Shumway. The first time he'd gone voluntarily, or at least intentionally, unable to see any other course of action, but driven by the absolute necessity of saving Sophie that overrode all other priorities. The second time had been a screw-up, a dumb misunderstanding by Ricky Wurmtoter, but even as the crossbow bolt had sheared through the tissue of Paul's heart, he'd known that there was a way back, a get-out-of-jail-free card nestling in his sleeve lining. This time he hadn't really believed he was dead until practically the last minute, and then there'd been a couple of lucky chances - the blood on the sword, the Portable Door in his safe-deposit box. For all he knew there'd be a fourth or a fifth time, and he'd find himself back in the land of the living by the skin of his teeth, thanks to some clever magic trick or prudently stockpiled artefact. But eventually, because of what he was and the terms and conditions governing his existence, a time would come when he'd be there and there'd be no way back; he'd be stuck there for ever; like hanging around an airport lounge for all eternity, parted from all his companions and possessions, nothing to eat or drink or read or do, waiting for a flight that had been delayed permanently. The time would come, and everything he did until then was pointless and stupid, building sandcastles in the face of the incoming tide.

  Paul thought of Mr Dao's well-meant advice: please deposit all hope tidily in the receptacles provided, because you'll be better off without. Wasn't hope just another lethal addiction, starting as a jolt of something to help you through the day, developing into a habit, then a craving, then a slow poison? Hope binds the addict to his needle, nurturing the old lie that each beat of the heart, each lungful of air is a useful prevarication, keeping all options open. The truth was Mr Dao and the floor that was no floor and the sky that wasn't actually there, and sitting watching stalactites grow and the slow drip from the leak in the roof gouging the Grand Canyon out of solid rock. When Paul had been a boy, he'd lain awake worrying himself sick about what would happen when the sun burnt itself out and the sky went cold, only a billion or SO years from now. But he'd fretted unnecessarily, he realised, because whatever happened to stars and planets and galaxies, whether they burned up or crashed into asteroids or broke up into dust and got caught up in the drag of a dead gas giant, swirling for ever like the skirts of a pirouetting dancer, it'd make no difference at all. Mr Dao would still be there when all the stars had gone out and the whole skyful of flying rocks had eventually come to rest. Even if, by diabolical cunning and supreme sublime genius Paul outlasted the last little drop of water and grain of sand, he'd still have a reservation in the kingdom of the dead, a place assigned and waiting for him, a home to go to when the adventures were all over.

  Nice cheerful things to think about at three o'clock in the morning.

  At one minute past nine the next morning, Paul rang JWW and, knowing the drill, asked to speak to Christine, Mr Tanner's secretary.

  'It's Paul,' he said. 'Just to let you know I'm not feeling well, so I won't be coming in today.'

  He could picture the stormy crease of her eyebrows. 'What's wrong with you?'

  'I died.'

  Pause. 'You don't sound very dead to me.'

  'I sort of got better,' Paul admitted. 'But it's only temporary. Sooner or later I'll have a relapse and then that'll be it, kerboom, finito. So really, there's not a lot of point me coming in, is there?'

  Christine wasn't the sharpest serpent's tooth in the kindergarten, but she could spot a rhetorical question when she heard one. 'Have you got a doctor's note?'

  'What? No, I haven't. But you could ask Benny Shumway to check with Mr Dao at the Bank if you like. He'll tell you that I'm telling the truth, and you can't get more authoritative than that, can you?'

  But Christine wasn't so easily fobbed off. 'It says in the book you're entitled to sick leave,' she said. 'Doesn't say anything about death leave. You hang on there a minute while I go and check with Mr Tanner.'

  To Paul's great surprise, Mr Tanner was prepared to let him have a day off; not just one, in fact, but the traditional three. If, however, he hadn't risen again from the dead on the third day, he'd better be able to have a death certificate, a valid will and a little urn of ashes ready for inspection when he finally did condescend to show up, or the old cliché about a fate worse than death might suddenly take on new and startlingly vivid penumbras of meaning. At first, Paul was tak
en aback by this unexpected display of compassion; then it occurred to him that Mr Tanner might well be taking his orders in the matter from his mother.

  Three whole days ... True, Paul remained painfully conscious of the fact that he was still squatting in a cell on Nature's Death Row waiting for his rendezvous with the big chair, but even so, the thought of three days off - five, in fact, since tomorrow was Saturday, and even Mr Tanner couldn't expect him to be dead on his own time - was enough to bring a huge grin to his face. As soon as he'd hung up the phone, he grabbed a sheet of paper and did some calculations. His finances were in their usual dismal state, but if he scrimped and saved for the rest of the month and made do with mousetrap cheese on plastic toast washed down with tap water, he could just about afford a little impromptu holiday. He could- He could go away. The prospect stunned him. It had been nine months, more than nine months, since he'd been out of London except on grim and horrible official business. It was, he remembered, summer; he could borrow a tent, get on a coach, head off into the green and pleasant stuff, to fresh air and lush green grass and soldier ants in the groundsheet. He hadn't been camping since he was a kid - actually, he'd loathed the one time they'd gone camping and had spent the whole holiday praying for the rain to wash the tent away so that they could go home. But camping was all he could afford, and what the hell was the point in being temporarily officially dead if you had to spend your limited ration of afterlife cooped up in a grotty bedsit watching daytime TV?

  By an amazing coincidence, the unemployed guitarist who lived on the floor above had a tent, which he wouldn't be needing again until Glastonbury; Paul bumped into him on the stairs as he went to empty the bins, raised the subject hopefully and five minutes later returned to base with the black plastic sack containing the tent tucked safely under his arm. Great, he thought as he threw a few items of clothing into a Tescos bag, I've got everything I need, including my portable shelter. Wonderful; I've scrambled so far up the evolutionary ladder that I'm almost on equal terms with a snail.

  It had to be the seaside; because the only happy memory from his childhood that Paul could still call back every time, without fail, with perfect focus and total recall, was a week he'd spent at Weston-super-Mare when he'd been eight. True, it had rained for five of the seven days, and while it was raining his parents had sulked and snapped, and he'd read his comic at least two dozen times, to the point where, even now, he could draw most of it with his eyes shut. But when it hadn't been raining they'd sat on the beach and he'd built sandcastles, and played beach football with Dad, and paddled in rock pools and persecuted small, strange-looking crustaceans among the seaweed. As he sat in the train, eyes shut, waiting for the slightly vertiginous judder that meant they were under way, he played back the scene one more time, just to make sure it was still there. Anybody looking at him would have assumed he was asleep and dreaming, but it was far, far better than any dream, because it had come true, once, and the past is perfect; it's closed off and sealed, watertight and timetight, so that nothing can leak into it and spoil it. He knew he was grinning all over his face, and the other passengers in the compartment probably thought he was drunk or stoned or peculiar, but he didn't care. He'd died often enough not to worry about what people on trains thought about him.

  Then a flexing of the seat cushion under his bum told Paul that someone had sat down next to him. Instinctively he shifted to make room, and opened his eyes.

  Shit, he thought.

  'Thought it was you,' said Mr Laertides, frowning at him. 'What're you doing on a train? You're supposed to be ill in bed.'

  As always, Mr Laertides had a disconcertingly unfinished look about him, the sort of mildly annoying failure to convince you'd associate with computer-generated animation in the movies. The light and shadows didn't seem quite right under his eyes and beside his nose, and there were gaps in the way he moved, as though a few frames were missing.

  'Um,' Paul said.

  'I was looking for you first thing,' Mr Laertides went on. 'You weren't in your room, so I asked Christine, and she said you were off sick. At death's door, she said.'

  Paul sighed. There had been a time when something like this, being caught skiving by the boss, would've been his worst nightmare. He was still fundamentally the same person who used to think that way, and it was a habit that he needed to break. Oddly enough, dying the first two times hadn't cured him of his naughty-schoolboy complex; but this last time he'd come so close . . . So he grinned. 'Yup,' he said. 'Literally. Only some clown locked it just as I was about to go through, so I had to go the long way round.'

  Mr Laertides froze for a moment; the look on his face put Paul in mind of a diplomat at the United Nations, waiting for the simultaneous translation. 'Presumably you mean the door in the cashier's office,' he said. 'I heard about that. But surely that was months ago, before I even joined the firm.'

  That hadn't been what Paul was expecting; still, he wasn't being told off, either. 'This was yesterday,' he said. 'Actually,' he added, frowning, 'yesterday and the day before, because the christening was in the evening, right? After work. But when I tried to get through Benny's door, he was just coming back from the Bank. I must've been down there a whole day.'

  Mr Laertides raised a faintly two-dimensional eyebrow. 'I haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about,' he said. 'And talking of the christening, where did you get to? You were supposed to be the godfather, weren't you? But I didn't see you there.'

  'You didn't?' A tiny flicker of doubt snagged Paul's attention, like a trout fly dragged through murky water. 'You didn't see the cake, with the girls jumping out?'

  'Cake? Oh, right, yes, I saw that.'

  'But you didn't see me? I was the one cutting it, and then-'

  'Ah, got you.' Mr Laertides nodded. 'That would explain a lot. What you were doing on the wrong side of Mr Shumway's door, for one thing. But you got back, evidently.'

  It was as though someone else was running Paul's mind. Not an invasion or a hostile takeover, more as though a kind friend had said to him, You look really tired, you relax for ten minutes and I'll hold the fort for you. Now this kind friend was telling him that it'd be good to confide in Mr Laertides, who seemed a nice enough bloke, even if he was a partner; and he'd be far less likely to get into trouble for skiving off work if he just fessed up and told the truth. Personally, Paul thought the kind friend was either drunk or exceptionally stupid, but it was out of his hands, unfortunately. 'I saw Mr Dao and got the Door,' he heard himself say. 'Oh, and I was able to get that far because there was still a bit of blood left on the sword.'

  Mr Laertides was perfectly still, apart from a tiny flicker round the edges. 'Maybe you'd like to start at the beginning,' he said.

  So Paul told him all about it, straight through to the point where Mr Tanner's mum had brought him the slice of cake and left him to eat it. When he'd finished, Mr Laertides steepled his fingers and pressed them to his lips, a study in profound thought by an undistinguished pupil of Rodin. 'But that doesn't make sense,' he said.

  Paul had to grin at that. 'Which bit did you have in mind?' he said.

  'The sword,' Mr Laertides said. 'Everything else is pretty straightforward - though, if you don't mind me saying so, I think you might be a bit more careful choosing your friends in future. It's fine for Rosie Tanner to say it was simple and obvious, what you had to do to escape, but she wasn't the one having to do it. But that's beside the point, and we can all be a tad thoughtless at times. No, what I can't figure out is this sword thing.'

  Mr Laertides wasn't making any effort to keep his voice down, but the other passengers in the compartment (which was almost full) didn't seem to be taking any notice. 'Don't worry about it,' he said with a faint smile, as though he could read Paul's thoughts. 'They can't see us chatting. What they think they can see is you fast asleep, and me talking very loudly into my mobile phone about some really boring meeting I'm late for. So, they aren't listening to me. A simple first-level glamour, your basic Je
di mind trick. I can teach you how to do that in five minutes flat, if you're interested.'

  'Can you? I mean, that'd be really kind of you, of course, only-'

  Mr Laertides shrugged. 'The offer's still open - working in my department for a couple of months, once you're finished with Theo. Entirely up to you, and you don't have to decide yet, of course. But about the sword. You said you kept it with you, after you- 'Died,' Paul said. 'That's right. The goblins killed me, and the next thing I knew I was sitting in this television studio; and I still had the sword in my hand.'

  'Extraordinary,' Mr Laertides said, and the intensity in his voice was rather unsettling. 'That's not supposed to happen, really it isn't. You know the saying, you can't take it with you. Absolutely true, no exceptions. The very most you can do is have it sent on to await arrival, but that's a different procedure entirely.' He sat scowling thoughtfully for three seconds, then leaned forward a little. 'So what became of it?' he asked. 'The sword, I mean. Did you leave it down there, in the Underworld?'

  Paul shrugged. 'I'm not sure,' he said. 'I think I must still have had it when I ran at the door, but after that I'm not sure. No, hang on; I remember wondering where it had got to after I tried to get through the door and it was shut. I suppose I must've dropped it down there somewhere; but I didn't get around to looking for it because that was when Mr Dao showed up again, and I suddenly thought of using the Portable Door, and of course that shoved the sword clean out of my mind.'

  'Ah.' Mr Laertides didn't relax, but he turned down the volume of his body language a little. 'In which case, presumably, it's lost down there for ever. Which is a pity - I'd have liked to have seen this remarkable object. Where did you say you got it from?'