by Tom Holt
“I see,” Chris said. “Why there?”
“Geometaphysical fault line runs slap bang though the middle of the Ettingate Retail Park,” she told him. “Been known about for centuries, but when we told the local planning authority they just weren’t interested. We think the demons chose it because the fault makes it easier to shift a material object—you, for example—out of our dimension into theirs. That and the portable parking space.”
“What, they used a BB27—”
“Probably stolen from your car,” Jill said, with a commiserating smile. “It’s well known that they can cause dimensional-interface ruptures. They’ll have kept the space empty while they were waiting for you to arrive with some kind of illusion, so the shoppers would’ve thought the space was taken. The demon pretending to be Angela simply parked the car on top of it and—swoosh, there you go.”
“Hang on, though,” Chris said. “We were lost, I got us lost. So how did they know I’d drive us to exactly that—?”
Another smile. “The map was jinxed,” she said. “Again, fairly elementary stuff. It made you go there. So there’s one positive thing to come out of all of this. You’re not nearly as rubbish at map-reading as you thought you were.”
Chris sighed. “Sort of makes it all seem worthwhile, really.”
“Quite.” Jill laughed. She had, he remembered, always laughed at his jokes. “So the real mystery is,” she went on, “what it is that they think you know, and they’re so desperate to find out. It must be something really important to them, because all this, the planning, the set-up, it’s a hell of a lot of trouble for them to go to; really expensive, in terms of energy expended in our dimension, I mean.”
Chris nodded. “You told me all about that,” he said.
“Which brings us back to the question,” Jill went on, with a sigh. “Who’s this she they’re so dead keen to find?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “SatNav—the, um, entity inside my SatNav; she’s a she.”
Jill frowned. “So am I,” she said. “Actually, so are a lot of people.”
“Yes, but maybe she’s involved in all this.” Chris hesitated; but surely it couldn’t do any harm now, not after SatNav had tried to kill him—”There was one thing I didn’t tell you, about the other demon. The one yesterday.”
Her eyes gleamed. “I thought so,” she said. “Well?”
So he told her; how, just before it left the car, the demon had reached past him and turned SatNav on with its claw. “And that’s all,” he concluded lamely. “I didn’t tell you at first because I didn’t think it was important—”
“Fibber.”
“All right.” Chris held up a hand in front of his face. “You’re right. I was afraid that if I told you, your people would take her away and break her open or something. I didn’t want anything to happen to her.” He raised both hands and spread his fingers: surrender. “You know why, don’t you?”
Compassion; compassion in victory, which isn’t quite the same thing. “Like I said,” Jill replied, “you aren’t the first, I don’t suppose you’ll be the last, and I’m not going to pass judgement. And you’ve told me now, which is the main thing. And yes,” she added, “I do think it’s significant. Not absolutely sure why, but I have a feeling about it. like, it may just answer the really big question that’s been bugging both of us: why you?”
Chris tried to think, but—”All right, then. Why me?”
“Simply because the thing happened to be banged up in your SatNav,” she said. “If that’s what they’re after. It’s just a hypothesis at this stage,” she added quickly. “Barely that, even. Still, half a hypothesis is marginally better than a complete and utter clue deficiency. All right,” she said, “I think that’s everything for now.” She glanced at her watch. “Lunchtime,” she said. “I reckon the least the government can do is buy you a pint and a sandwich after screwing up your Saturday. Or would you rather get on home?”
Be back by one, Karen had said. Well, no chance of that now. What a pity. “On expenses?” he queried.
“Your taxes at work,” Jill replied. “Tell you what: a pint, a sandwich and a packet of crisps. We can always make up the budget deficiency by firing a few clerical officers. And,” she added, “I promise not to say a word about demons or malevolent SatNav entities or geometaphysical rifts. Deal?”
Jill kept her promise. Instead, they talked about old friends from school, all of whose lives turned out to be either vastly better or immeasurably worse than his own. That left Chris fifty per cent depressed and fifty per cent obnoxiously smug, and two pints at lunchtime added a haze of gentle anaesthesia. She paid for his taxi home.
The bathroom, he remembered; he was supposed to start stripping off the old wallpaper. The cheerful part of him thought why not, and the miserable part thought might as well, so he went into the kitchen to assemble the necessary arsenal.
There on the table was the pantacopt-tape-measure. Bloody stupid thing to leave lying about, he told himself sternly; what if Karen had found it and started playing with it? She could’ve turned herself into salami before she’d realised there was something wrong. He took it into the bedroom and hid it under the bed, out of harm’s way.
How to strip off wallpaper. First, you get it wet with the stuff from the bottle. This makes it soggy, and then you scrape at it with the scraper. Chris had never been any good at it, but it hadn’t mattered when he was young, because one of grandad’s friends from the factory came round and did it by magic in ten minutes flat. He’d taken the trouble to learn the magic words, but he couldn’t make them work. Hence the bottle of stuff, and the scraper.
Half an hour of picking and worrying away at it, and he’d cleared a space the size of a wine-bottle label. He wasn’t sure when Karen’d be back, but he was conscious of the need to get a move on. He dabbed on more of the stuff and scraped harder, with the result that he snapped the scraper blade, cut his thumb, jumped back in alarm and knocked over the stuff bottle, spilling the remaining contents into the sink.
At least it hadn’t gone all over the carpet tiles. Still, it was a pretty close approximation to a disaster, and for a while Chris stood there feeling sad, unable to think of anything he could do about it. Then a thought struck him.
It was sheer desperation; but—well, the Book had said they cut anything. He retrieved the tape-measure, ran out nine inches of blade and (bending it slightly so it lay flush against the wall) stroked the half-soggy wallpaper with it.
Instant success: it came away like shaving foam under a new razor blade. He tried it again. His next sweep cleaned off three square feet, leaving the plastered wall smooth and unmarked. At this rate—his inner accountant was totalling up the brownie points, and the result was staggering. If only he could contrive to get the whole job finished by the time she got back—not implausible, at the rate the tape-measure was going—not only would he be forgiven for not being home in time to go socialising, but there’d be enough change left over to pay for at least one, maybe two further mistakes. Right, he thought.
The blade made a gentle hissing noise as it snowploughed through the paper, and the lack of stuff from the bottle didn’t seem to make any difference at all; magic, he assumed. How nice it must be, he thought, ever so slightly resentfully, to be able to do proper magic, like this, all the time: magic to wash up and hoover, dust, scour ovens, wash cars. How useful; how convenient. Instead, all he got was demons and geometaphysical rifts, action-adventure stuff which scared him rigid and interfered with his chances of making his monthly target. Even the stuff he sold to the shops—well, it wasn’t action-adventure, but a lot of it was just toys, junk, no practical application in the real world. Now, if only JWW Retail could come up with a line of genuinely useful consumer and household items—
There was, Chris noticed, something written on the wall, under the archaeological strata of wallpaper layers. He could make out the top halves of a row of letters, big block capitals in blue chalk. Mildly
intrigued, he scraped down a little further until he could read them:
DANGER
He frowned. Gas main? Electricity cable? Nice of whoever it was to mention it, but a little more information would have been helpful. He scraped a little further.
YOU ARE IN TERRIBLE DANGER
All right, he thought, but please be more specific; do not drill here, or something like that. Also, terrible danger? As in bringing the whole wall down, or frying himself to a crisp? He scraped down, and got:
TRUST NO ONE
He stood back and scratched his head. A practical-joking painter and decorator with a flair for melodrama. “You included” he said aloud; then, with a shrug, scraped a bit more.
EXCEPT ME, OBVIOUSLY
Um, he thought. Well; a practical-joking painter and decorator with a flair for melodrama and delusions of humour might have guessed what a normal person’s reaction might be. He was getting close to the bottom of the wall now, and had to stoop to scrape the next patch:
THE DEMONS ARE HUNTING YOU. THEY WILL
Oh shit, Chris thought.
Let’s see, he said to himself. We’ve been here, what, four years; we redid the bathroom when we moved in, but we were in a hurry, so we just papered over what was already there; and there’s three, no, four layers; so that’s our layer and three more. Which means this lot’s been here a long time, and there isn’t any way of writing through waterproof vinyl wallpaper. In which case, this message can’t be for me, can it? Well?
He read it again:
THE DEMONS ARE HUNTING YOU. THEY WILL
They will what? He got on his hands and knees and scraped right down to the skirting board:
CONTINUED ON NEXT WALL
Fine. He went into the kitchen and fetched the folding steps, and started scraping at the top of the right-hand wall.
HUNT YOU DOWN UNTIL THEY FIND YOU. THEY HAVE ALREADY
He slipped on the top rung of the steps, dropped the tape-measure and grabbed at the wall with his left hand to steady himself. Then he looked down and saw, with a resigned wretched feeling, that the tape-measure had sliced the doors off the bathroom cabinet. Marvellous, he thought. If I wasn’t in terrible danger before, I am now.
TRIED ONCE. NEXT TIME I WILL NOT BE THERE TO SAVE YOU. THE ONE WHO IS TO COME MUST BE PROTECTED AT ALL COSTS. ONLY YOU CAN
Oh for crying out loud, the telephone. Chris hopped off the ladder, carefully laid the tape-measure on the floor, and scampered through into the hall.
“There’s been a development.” Jill’s voice, sounding rattled. “It’s really weird, I can’t—”
Not now, he thought. “Look, Jill, could I call you back? Only I’m sort of up to my eyes right at this very moment.”
“It’s back.”
All right, then. “What’s back?”
“The entity,” she said. “It’s back inside your SatNav. We went to do a low-level demiurge scan on the casing, and it’s definitely in there.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Sort of.” Definite hesitation in her voice. “Only, the thing is, it’s sort of barricaded itself in, and we can’t open it up. God only knows how it’s doing it, some kind of really powerful Gatekeeper or Portcullis charm, the energy drain must be off the scale, but it’s managing it somehow.”
He thought for a bit, then said, “Hardly surprising, though, is it? I mean, she must know that if you can crack the casing open, you’re going to do nasty things to her, for escaping. Not,” he added quickly, “that I’ve got any sympathy, I’m just saying. It’s basic survival instinct, surely.”
“I suppose,” Jill replied. “It’s still crazy, though. For one thing, if it managed to get loose why in heaven’s name would it want to come back? It’s like an escaped convict breaking back into prison. Doesn’t make sense.”
She had a point, as always. “Even so,” he said. “She’s back under lock and key, so all’s well that ends well.”
“It’s not as simple as that. In the first place, how did it get out? Second, how did it get back in again and why? Third, how’s it managing to keep us out, and how come a fairly low-grade entity like that’s generating that kind of power?”
That jogged Chris’s memory. “Talking of which,” he said, “I meant to ask you. What is she, exactly? I mean, you just keep saying the entity. Is she a demon, or what?”
Jill sounded shocked. “Oh no, nothing like that. Something pretty innocuous; well, relatively. They can all be bloody dangerous if you aren’t careful. No, it’s just a plain ordinary dryad, no big deal, or so you’d have thought.”
“Fine. What the hell’s a dryad?”
“Oh, right. It’s a nature spirit or genius loci, almost exclusively associated with forests. They live in trees and protect them from enemies. Basically, just an elf.”
“Elf?”
“Yes.”
For a moment, the word made no sense. “Like, Santa’s little helpers, that sort of thing?”
“No,” Jill snapped impatiently. “Tell you what, look it up. There’s a very helpful guide to species recognition and characteristics on our website, doubleyoudoubleyoudoubleyou dot delendisunt, all one word, dot gov dot uk forward slash entities. All you need to know in one handy easy-to-access reference. All right?”
“Just a tick, this pencil’s not very—what was that word, delen—?”
She spelt it out for him. “Got that? Fine. Look, sorry but I’ve got to dash. Just thought you’d like to know. One less thing to worry about—well, for you, anyhow.”
An elf, Chris thought as he put the phone down, she’s an elf.
He tried to picture an elf in his mind, but the image that presented itself didn’t seem quite right, and he had a feeling he was probably getting “elf muddled up with “smurf’. Anyway, it didn’t matter. If she was safely back in her casing, it was, as Jill had said, one less thing to stress out about. Talking of which—
Back into the bathroom, grab the tape-measure, up the ladder, scrape, and—
YOU’RE BACK, THEN. GOOD OF YOU TO SPARE THE TIME
He sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said aloud. “Now, you’d got as far as ‘only you can—’”
ONLY YOU CAN BRING THE ONE THAT IS TO COME ACROSS THE INTERFACE
His arm was starting to get ever so tired. “Is that right?” he said. “What interface?”
Scrape, scrape, scrape; and—
WHO WERE YOU TALKING TO, ANYHOW?
Chris scowled, “Just an old school friend, if it’s any of your business. Look—”
The tape-measure slipped out of his hand and slid down the wall, taking a great swathe of paper with it. Nice trick, he couldn’t help but concede.
YOU MUST SET FREE THE ONE WHO IS CURSED, RESCUE THE ONE THAT IS TO COME FROM THOSE THAT ARE HIDDEN AND END THE WAR AMONG THE CHILDREN OF THE DARK. IF YOU FAIL, YOU WILL DIE AND THE HUMAN RACE WI—
“Hang on,” he panted, moving the stepladder. “OK, the human race wi—”
LL PERISH. EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON YOU
His right hand was starting to go numb. He rested it for thirty seconds, then scraped some more:
I WILL HELP YOU, AS I HAVE ALWAYS DONE. HOWEVER, SINCE
The tape-measure slipped out of his hand again. This time, luckily, it missed the fixtures and fittings and flumped down on the floor. He snatched it up, and—
YOU MISSED A BIT
He blinked, then looked up. Sure enough, there was a little patch of paper that had escaped the blade. He flicked it off, then went back to where he’d got to.
Nothing there.
He did the rest of the wall. Nothing. Just plain, uninscribed plaster as far as the eye could see.
By the time Karen got home he’d done the whole of the bathroom, every last square centimetre. Also, he’d been over the whole lot with sandpaper and a wire brush; to get off any loose plaster, he explained, and make sure there was a firm surface for the new paper to stick to. She did manage to find fault with some dark smeary marks
, like badly erased chalk, but her heart clearly wasn’t in it, and she barely sulked at all about him not being back by one as he’d promised.
That night, Chris didn’t sleep at all well. A dream kept going round in his head, repeating like a loop.
There was the demon, edging towards him; in the dream it was light in the box formed by the faded car, and he could see it clearly. It crawled on all fours as far as his feet, then looked up at him with fiery orange eyes, and whimpered, “Help me, please.” As it said the words, a shadow fell across it, so he couldn’t see it any more; and then an egg the size of a rugby ball split open, and SatNav jumped out, golden and shining, and said, “Leave her alone, she’s just a baby,” and then popped back into the egg, whose shell flew back into place like a rewound film. Then he stood up, and the egg was in his pocket, and it was saying, “At the end of the world, turn right.” And then Jill popped up out of nowhere, grabbed him by the hair and laid the blade of a tape-measure across his throat, at which point he woke up.
Being awake wasn’t much better; he had that extra-creepy feeling he hadn’t experienced since he was a small child, that mere was something in the room, watching him. As if that wasn’t enough to be going on with, something was nagging away at his mind, and he couldn’t pin it down; something to do with water polo, and websites. When he drifted off to sleep, the dream came back again, waking him up. And so on.
Chris spent Sunday hanging wallpaper, but no more messages came. Just after lunch, he got the Book out and looked up pantacopts; same entry as before, but he’d missed a bit where it said about the disorientating effect of handling such a powerful magical object if you weren’t used to it. Delusions and hallucinations were common side effects, it said, and recommended the wearing of gloves, eye and ear protection and a surgical mask.