May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  Karen got home shortly after eleven, just as Chris was about to go to bed. He got as far as “You’ll never guess what happened—”, but then she turned out the light and went straight to sleep.

  When Chris opened the front door and saw his own car parked outside, he felt a lump in his throat that had nothing to do with porridge and stale bread. True, compared with the BMW or even the jeep it was just a tin can on wheels, but it was, in a very real sense, his home; more so than the flat could ever be. It was his main defensible space, where he could retreat and lock the doors on the world, and he’d missed it.

  SatNav wasn’t there, of course. There was just a smudge on the windscreen where her rubber sucker had been, and the knob was back in the lighter socket where her flex used to plug in. He reminded himself of how narrow his escape had been, and started the engine.

  Angela wasn’t pleased. “I like driving,” she protested, when he told her they’d be using his car instead of the jeep. He pointed out that it wasn’t fair on her to put all those extra miles on her personal vehicle, when the company supplied him with a car. She assured him that she wasn’t bothered about that, but he insisted. His conscience, he said, wouldn’t let him—

  (Conscience; the Fury on Frank Ackery’s shoulder. He shuddered. Angela said something about a nip in the air and turned the heater on.)

  Maybe she was sulking about the car issue, or maybe she was thinking about something else; they drove in silence for a while, and then Chris asked if she minded if he had the radio on. “You go ahead,” she replied, making it sound like he’d just declared war, and he thought: raw emotion, at this hour of the morning, just what I really need.

  He stabbed the button with his finger and got music; rather nice, though he hadn’t heard it before. He was just getting into it when Angela reached across and turned it off.

  “I was listening to that,” he said.

  She scowled at him. “We need to talk,” she said.

  Oh, he thought; because when women say “We need to talk,” especially in that tone of voice, what they really mean is, “You’re going to listen, and it’s going to take a very long time, and the subject isn’t going to be Aston Villa’s chances of avoiding relegation.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Fire away”; and then her phone rang.

  One of the things about demons that unsettled Chris—a very small thing compared to the rest of it, but disturbing nonetheless: if there really are such things as demons, does that necessarily imply that there’s such a thing as God? Or is that just a sign of intellectual laziness and a failure to understand the maths and the metaphysics? Well, he thought, as Angela yanked out her phone and snapped “Yes?” at it, I can cut through all that stuff and say quite definitely that God exists and He’s taken pity on me at last. Oh, and please, he added under his breath, please let it be her mother, and keep her on the phone till we get to Stafford.

  (And it was her mother, and they were through Stafford and out the other side before Angela said her last “Yes, I know, I’m sorry” and jammed the phone back in her pocket; and yes, it was a bit scary, but in the nicest possible way—)

  “You were saying?” he said smoothly.

  “What?”

  “You wanted to talk to me about something.” She gave him a foul look. “Later,” she said. “We’re nearly there.”

  “So we are. Well, never mind.”

  Their first call was an old favourite of Chris’s: Honest John’s House of-Spells, established 1956, an extraordinarily tall, thin shop squeezed in between a tyre-and-exhaust place and a sandwich bar, with stock piled up in heaps wherever you looked and a stuffed goblin on the counter instead of a cash register. Honest John had been Chris’s first-ever customer. He was almost as tall and thin as his shop, with a greasy curtain of long grey hair, a matted beard like a vertical hearthrug and an eyepatch. The scuttlebutt in the trade was that John was actually the last of the old Norse gods, hiding out from the countless firms of lawyers who wanted to serve him with product-liability writs concerning the creation of the universe. Whatever; Chris had always got on well with Honest John, though he had a healthy respect for his pair of pet ravens.

  “Morning,” said John. He gave Angela a long, hard stare, then frowned and moved a little to the left so he couldn’t see her. “I got a bone to pick with you.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Those crystal balls,” John said. “You can have them all back.”

  “Oh,” Chris said. “Don’t they work?”

  John grinned at him. “They work just fine,” he said. “You power them up, and the first thing you see is, This product will cease to function twenty-four hours after the warranty expires. I got them all packed up out the back, you can take them on with you when you go.”

  “Fair enough,” Chris said. “Oh, this is Angela, she’s—”

  John didn’t seem to have heard him. “Just as well you’re here,” he said. “I’m down to my last half-dozen dried waters. Got any in the car?”

  Several times Angela tried to butt in, but John seemed incapable of seeing or hearing her. He placed a large order for curses, took a dozen BB27Ks to see how they’d go and insisted on being shown the TimeOut Instant Bank Holiday—

  “It’s pretty straightforward,” Chris explained. “It looks just like an ordinary DVD, right. You stick it in any conventional DVD player, and hey presto, twenty-four hours of uninterrupted leisure time to spend as you wish. And it’s outside of linear time, so it’s ideal for lunchtimes, coffee breaks, any time when you’re stressed out and really need a breather. Look, I’ll show you.”

  Three minutes or twenty-four hours later, John said, “There’s a towel over there, look, next to the card terminal.”

  “Thanks,” Chris replied, rain dripping down his nose. “You’ve got to admit, though, it’s very realistic”

  “I’ll think about it,” John replied, as Chris dried himself off. “Now then, ever-filled purses, I was thinking about doing a buy one, get one free—”

  A very good order indeed, and it took a long time, partly because John wanted Chris to demonstrate several other lines, partly because the ravens kept swooping down and trying to peck Angela’s eyes out; and since John was refusing to acknowledge her existence, he couldn’t be prevailed upon to call them off. In the end, she mumbled something about waiting in the car, and fled.

  “That was a bit uncalled for, wasn’t it?” Chris said, as the shop door closed behind her. “What was?”

  Oh well, he thought, and carried on writing out the order. When it was eventually finished, he asked if he could use John’s bathroom.

  John looked at him. “You sure?”

  “Well, yes. I mean, it’s not quite desperate yet, but—”

  Shrug. “Second floor, first on your left. Password’s Gotterddmmerung.”

  Hardly designed to inspire confidence; but it proved to be a perfecdy ordinary shop toilet—narrow, faintly grubby, wisps of dusty cobweb festooning the pipes, cardboard boxes of stock blocking access to the facilities, brick dust in the sink, a bent coat-hanger in place of the more usual chain and the door wouldn’t shut properly. Chris washed his hands in grey water, wiped them on the threadbare towel and reached out to put the seat back down—

  Odd, he thought. Since he’d used it, about ten seconds ago, the lavatory had changed. Instead of a short drop and a disinfectant-blue meniscus, there was a tunnel, a bit like the London Underground stood on end. It was lit by flaming torches in holders driven into the wall at regular ten-yard intervals, blurring into a solid line of light in the far distance. He felt a surge of vertigo and straightened up quickly, grabbing the towel rail for support. Not a pretty sight, but by no means the strangest thing he’d ever seen in a shop toilet. He turned to leave and collided with Honest John, who was standing in the doorway.

  John grinned at him. “Now wash your hands,” he said.

  “I already did,” Chris replied.

  “Fine,” John said, and shoved him hard in the chest.<
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  Chris lurched backwards, and the insides of his knees hit the rim of the toilet bowl and buckled. For a moment he seemed to hover, arguing the toss with gravity; then he toppled backwards through the hole in the toilet seat, which opened like a mouth to swallow him. His head caught the edge of the seat and he yelped, and then he was plummeting through empty air, a line of upside-down torches flashing past his eyes as he fell.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Be quiet, Chris’s mother used to tell him, and don’t make a fuss; and on the whole he’d done his best, no matter what life had thrown at him. When Danny Quinn had put a dead mouse in Miss Blake’s desk and Chris had been given detention for it, when the assessment board had told him he hadn’t got the gift, when Jill had given him the polite but comprehensive brush-off; when demons started popping up practically everywhere he went, he’d kept his face shut and his upper lip rigid and moved on. It was one of the few things he liked about himself: the calm, stoical acceptance, the refusal to break down and make an exhibition of himself.

  But what the hell. As the air buffeted his face and the slipstream set him spinning, he opened his mouth, filled his lungs and yelled. Didn’t do any good. Didn’t even make him feel better. Like so many of the things your mother warns you against, when you actually get around to trying it you realise you haven’t really been missing anything much through all those years of noble abstinence.

  A flaming torch whizzed past his nose, scorching the very tip, but all he had left by way of lamentation was a rather low-key whimper. Hard to get all het up about a trivial burn when you’re about to be mashed into pulp on gravity’s anvil.

  A second or so later, he banged his knuckles quite hard on something, probably a torch bracket, but did he complain about it? Certainly not.

  He’d stopped. That puzzled him for a split second, until the pain in his arm and fingers clarified matters. When his hand had bashed into the torch bracket, he must instinctively have grabbed at it and, somehow or other, managed to close his hand around it and hang on. He was therefore dangling one-handed from the bracket, swaying slightly, with a hundred yards or so of tunnel above his head and rather more under his feet.

  You could call it an improvement if you were so inclined, but as far as Chris was concerned it was just another imaginative way of experiencing pain before he died. Pretty hopeless, by any criteria. No way in hell he’d be able to climb out of there, and how long could he reasonably expect to maintain his grip? Ten seconds? Fifteen at the very most? Pointless. The sensible thing would be to let go, get it over with. Just relax those fingers and let it happen. No silly fuss.

  His fingers stayed clamped tight shut. Well, fine, if they insisted on making a fatuous gesture. It really made no odds, after all. He sighed, and waited for his grip to fail. A handy opportunity, he decided, to have his life flash in front of his eyes while he was waiting. It was the only part of this experience that he felt any real enthusiasm for. The idea had always intrigued him; he’d often wondered which episodes in his life story the Great Editor would choose to montage for him—the most significant, naturally, but who was he to judge which moments had actually made all the difference? Maybe—too late now, of course, for it to be any use—the ultimate slide show would give him the hints he needed to make some sort of sense of a life that had always seemed while he was living it to be wildly and unnecessarily obscure—

  No slide show. No smiling host with a big red book. No blinding flashes of clarity. Also, he couldn’t help noticing, no grip failure. Either he was a hell of a lot stronger than he’d always thought, or something was going on.

  Screw it, Chris thought, and tentatively flexed his fingers. They came apart quite easily, though they were painful and stiff, as though he’d been carrying a heavy supermarket bag. No contact whatsoever with the torch bracket, but he wasn’t falling. Bloody odd, he thought, and looked down at his feet.

  He was standing, he discovered, on a bird. A humming bird? He was no ornithologist. One of those tiny, brightly coloured little buggers who can hold still in mid-air by flapping their tiny wings a million times a second. All he could see were the blurred wing-tips and the point of its beak, but there was no doubt about it; the little sweetheart was carrying his entire weight on its minuscule back, and apparently thinking nothing of it.

  Not possible, that went without saying. Magic, then. That actually made him feel a lot better. A real hummingbird couldn’t bear his weight for a split second, but who knew what a magic one might be capable of? Only one way to find out.

  So he waited patiently, watching the bird’s wings, and nothing happened.

  Then he thought: forget about the bird for a moment, pretend you’re standing on a ledge or something, and for crying out loud think of some way out of this. Easy to say, he thought back at himself, but this is about as bad a position as it’s possible to be in, really the chances of me getting out alive are—

  Not that bad, Chris thought suddenly, if someone were to stand at the top of the tunnel and let down a long, strong rope. I could tie it round me, and then all they’d have to do would be to pull me up. True, nobody knows I’m here except John, who pushed me down here in the first place, but that’s all right. After all, I have my phone. All I have to do is phone—well, Jill, obviously, she can send helicopters and storm troopers, strong men with cranes, wenches with winches, and I’ll be out of here like a cork out of a—

  No signal.

  For some reason, that upset him rather more than the falling stage of the proceedings had done; the hope, he reckoned, so much more painful than the terror or the despair. He started shivering, so much so that he lost his hold on the phone and dropped it. He watched it fall ever such a long way before it vanished into the darkness.

  For two pins, he thought, I’d jump. But he didn’t. Instead, he thought: all right, what else have I got? Quick rummage in his pockets. A CD case, containing Now That’s What I Call Realty Bad Music 56. A comb. A wallet. A pen. A screwed-up piece of tissue paper. A copy of The Book of All Human Knowledge—

  Well now, Chris thought, what about that? A book guaranteed to tell you what you really need to know. Tiresome and irritating, yes, and about as user-friendly as a shark, but guaranteed, with the full authority of JWW Retail behind it. Compared with the next best alternative, which was standing on a hummingbird waiting for something to turn up, it did seem curiously attractive.

  He glanced down to make sure the bird was still fluttering away—yes, fine—then opened the Book in the approved manner, at random. As was often the case, the words were blurry and illegible at first; if the information you needed was in any way abstruse or out of the ordinary, it took a while to search and assimilate. But he was a patient man. He gave the Book an encouraging smile, and tried not to think about the first signs of pins and needles in his right foot.

  The print clarified, as he’d known it would. It read—

  Downloading Updates; Please Wait Ah, he thought.

  There had been a fair few complaints about that; but, as Chris explained whenever a customer raised the issue, one of the Book’s main advantages over inferior rival publications was the support package; constant revision meant it was up to date literally to the minute, ensuring complete accuracy and guaranteed user satisfaction. True, from time to time you had to wait around for a bit, but that was a small price to pay for something you could trust absolutely.

  Ten minutes later, the words dissolved and were replaced by—

  Installing Updates: Installing 1 of 47 Estimated Time Remaining: 1 hour 40 minutes

  Oh, he thought. Well, maybe if I just—

  Interrupting Update Installation Will Result In Corrupt Data And Irreparable Damage

  On the positive side, there was a little animated picture of a clown doing handstands, presumably to keep Chris from getting lonely while he waited. He watched it for twenty minutes, after which its charm seemed to fade a little, so he spent the remaining eighty minutes swearing at the Book’s designers. He was just get
ting into his stride when the text flickered again, and read:

  Updates Installed Successfully

  You Will Need To Restart Your Application

  But all that proved to mean was closing the Book and opening it again; which got him—

  Gandhi; Mohandas Karatnchand Gandhi, born 2 October 1869, Porbandar, India. Best known for his policy of nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule, leading to independence in—

  What? Chris thought. No, really, please. Another time, sure, but not now. What I need to know is how to get off this bird and back up this vertical shaft without slipping, falling and going splat, so can we please try again? Please?

  He closed the Book, then opened it.

  Gandhi; Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, born 2 October—

  He’d never ground his teeth before—read about it, certainly, but never actually done it; wondered how you went about it, because it seemed such an odd way of expressing frustration and rage. In the event, it came quite naturally. Didn’t help much, though. Never mind; he had the key. Fold back the corner of the copyright page, and a menu drops down. Press show hidden with your thumbnail, and you get a list of options, including Index. Keep it simple; he touched his nail to Falling, and waited:

  Application blocked.

  Beneath his feet, the hummingbird wobbled. Poor little bugger, he thought, he must be knackered. He pulled the menu back up and tried Heights, great. Then he had a go at Down, problems associated with and Gravity, hostile and even Splat; but each time, all he got was—

  Application blocked.

  The bird was definitely starting to slow down. Instead of a blur, its wing-tips were becoming visible. Chris tried just opening the Book at random, on the off chance that it had fixed itself. More fucking Gandhi. He whimpered. The shock was starting to wear off, like a local anaesthetic, and panic was slowly creeping in. Magic, yes, but magic is very real and it’ll kill you given half the chance, and even an enchanted hummingbird couldn’t stay flapping its wings for ever and ever. A nasty thought occurred to him; maybe the bird was a JWW Retail product. In which case,—he was screwed—