May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  But that’s where A776015 comes in—

  “Sorry?” Chris said. “What—?”

  She frowned. “I forgot, you don’t know much about demons. Fine. Well, they don’t have names. In fact, they can’t, they’re nomenclature-intolerant. Your friend Jill knows all about this: get a demon to accept a name and he bursts into, flames and dies. So they have numbers instead. All clear, or would you like me to draw you a flow chart?”

  Sarcasm, he thought. The difference between sarcasm and a plane ticket to Switzerland was that he didn’t need sarcasm right now. “Perfectly clear,” he said stiffly. “You were saying.”

  “A776015 is the dissident leader,” she said. “A visionary, a truly great and original mind. She’s figured out a way that demons can harvest the emotion they need, unobtrusively, without your lot even knowing they’re there. It really would work, I’m sure of it, if only she gets the chance to try. Unfortunately,” she went on, pulling a sad face, “that’s not very likely. The orthodox demons hate the idea, won’t hear of it. And if they catch her, they’ll kill her, just to shut her up. Which is why she’s on the run,” SatNav added, “and why you’ve got to help her.”

  One of those two-pages-at-once moments. When eventually Chris got his voice back, he said, “Me! What the hell have I got to—?”

  Shrug. “Serendipity, really. You just happen to be in the right place at the right time.”

  Um, he thought. If that was her idea of the correct use of the word ‘right’, he had a good mind to report the editors of her dictionary to Trading Standards. “Why?” he snarled; and then, because it was still bugging him like anything, “It was you, wasn’t it? You wrote all over my bathroom wall, all that stuff about saving the one who is to come.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “A776015 is the one who is to come. So glad you were paying attention.”

  “You cow,” Chris snarled again. “It took me hours to get all those marks off.”

  “Sugar soap,” she said. Of course, he hadn’t tried that. “I tried to warn you about the demons,” she went on reproachfully, “but you didn’t even try to understand.”

  “Well, it was a bit bloody cryptic,” he snapped back defensively. “All that stuff about the one who is to come and the one who is cursed. Who the hell is that meant to be, by the way? And why a hummingbird?”

  But she wasn’t paying attention. Looked like she’d just heard something; she put a finger to her lips and mouthed “Shh.”

  He could hear it too; something between faint, distant whispering and the scuttling of mice. A fair bet that it wasn’t anything nice. Suddenly, SatNav rose quickly to her feet and produced the long, thin sword she’d had in the Ettingate car park, apparently out of thin air. She nodded sideways, towards the kitchen. Clear enough what she wanted him to do, but he stayed where he was. “What’s—?”

  She glowered at him. “They’re coming through,” she hissed. “Get out, now.”

  Definition of they easily guessed from context. Oh shit, Chris thought, as he jumped up and darted to the kitchen door. He opened it—

  And tripped over the door sill of his car, hovered for a second, fell forward, bumping his head, and flumped into the driver’s seat, banging his chin on the wheel as a sort of coda. The door slammed shut. The keys, he noticed, were in the ignition. SatNav’s casing was suckered to the windscreen in its usual position, but the light was off and the screen was blank. Through the passenger-door window, he could see Honest John’s shopfront. Fine, he thought, be like that. Just for fun, he checked the car’s milometer, which assured him he hadn’t been anywhere since he’d noted the mileage when they arrived.

  Everything, in fact, to suggest that none of it had happened, and he’d just left John’s place; apart, of course, from the little dangly mascot hanging from his rear-view mirror. It definitely hadn’t been there before. He’d have noticed if it had. A little plastic hummingbird directly in your line of sight isn’t something you overlook.

  Chris felt as though he ought to be doing something, but nothing sprang to mind. Furthermore, he had other calls to make; he reckoned he could probably kiss Honest John’s order goodbye, and he still had a quota to meet. True, he could ring Jill. Probably he ought to do just that. For some reason, though, he didn’t feel like it. Maybe something SatNav had said? He didn’t even want to think about that—

  Someone was banging on the window; Angela, looking pale and scared. He wound the window down.

  “Where the hell were you?” she gasped at him. “I’ve been worried sick.”

  “Really? I just—” He couldn’t think of anything to say, truth or lie. Fortunately, Angela didn’t give him the chance.

  “I waited and waited for you but you didn’t come out, so I went back in, and that John person said you’d gone out the other way without saying where, so I came back and waited by the car, then I went back in again and there was John lying on the floor in pieces—”

  “Sorry about that,” Chris said awkwardly. “There was an accident, so I—”

  “An accident? He was all sliced up. And still alive. What in God’s name—?”

  “Get in the car,” he said. “I’ll explain as we drive.”

  Angela got in, and he noticed she had a scratch on her cheek. Loads of ways she could’ve got that. “Well?” she demanded, as she fastened her seat belt. “What happened?”

  But Chris was thinking. Where is she? the Ettingate Retail Park demon had asked him; and the fugitive-dissident? visionary SatNav had told him about had been a she. The right place at the right time, huh?

  The little plastic hummingbird started to sway on its short cord as he pulled away and joined the constipated traffic. Angela didn’t seem to have noticed it.

  “Honest John flushed me down a toilet,” he said, so cool and matter-of-fact. “Don’t ask me why. He always was a bit of a funny bugger.”

  “Down a toilet!”

  Chris nodded. “Sort of magically enchanted, I suppose, or I wouldn’t have fitted. Bit of a bind climbing back out again.” Was it his imagination, or had the hummingbird’s plastic beak swung round and pointed at him as he said that? “Anyway, that’s what took me so long.”

  “And what the hell happened to him? It was horrible, he was—”

  “Ah, well.” He shrugged, so very Sean Connery. “I might’ve lost my rag a bit. I always wondered if the rumours about John being immortal were true. Looks like they are. I must remember to tell Jim Phillips next time I see him—he always reckoned it was a load of old socks.”

  “You did that?”

  Another shrug. “It’s like they say,” he replied. “It’s always the quiet ones. Anyway, that’s all it was, no big deal. Now, our next call’s Arnott & Meyer in Tamworth, they’re all right but they’ll try and shave us on discounts.”

  Angela was unusually quiet all the way to Tamworth, which nearly made the whole being-flushed-down-bogs-and-then-abducted-by-elves thing worthwhile. Fortunately, Chris knew the way like the back of his hand, so the vexed topic of navigation never arose.

  He used the unexpected peace and quiet to reflect on those parts of the day’s adventures which he could bear to contemplate without wanting to curl up in a ball and scream. Honest John, for instance. It didn’t really matter whether he was in league with the demons or whether they’d forced him to do it—threatened to blow his cover and grass him up to the product-liability lawyers whatever. Clearly it was another kidnapping attempt, like Ettingate; but that had been a wash-out, as far as the demons were concerned, he’d told them he didn’t know where She was, and they’d seemed to believe him, so why go to all the trouble of doing it again? And then there was this rigmarole about dissident demons, which might—if he believed a word of it; still very much undecided on that score—give him some idea of who She was. It occurred to him (not a pleasant thought) that it was just possible that he did know Her whereabouts—not knowingly knowing, so to speak, but a kind of knowing without knowing it. What, for example, if She was di
sguised as someone or even something else? What if—?

  “Watch out,” Angela said. “You nearly ran into the back of that Renault.”

  Pot and kettle; but she had a point. Chris couldn’t explain to her, though, why he’d just jerked the wheel and nearly caused an accident—it’d be embarrassing. The thought that had struck him at that precise moment was: what if bloody Angela is—Her? Think about it. Angela comes bursting into his life, thank you so much for that, Mr Burnoz, just what I always wanted, and straight away he can’t sneeze without a demon getting wet. No, really, he told himself, hear me out, okay? Never had any of this kind of trouble before—well, not since school, anyhow—so obviously, something must’ve changed, there had to be some new element. Well, what? The only one he could think of was Angela. Yes, but she’s just admitted that she’s really an undercover demon-hunter, one of Jill’s crowd. Think about that—If you were head of the demon-busters, would you be in favour of a demon dissident movement or against it? No-brainer. So; explanation #1: the demon-hunters are helping the dissidents, therefore Angela (if she’s really the dissidemon) knows enough about the organisation—DS, all that stuff—to bluff her way as one of them; seeing DS on the stupid polo shirt, she’d assumed—

  Well, fine. Various nits and loose ends there, we’ll come back to that later. Explanation #2: Jill and her crew are completely talon-in-glove with the dissidemons, and someone, maybe even Jill herself, planted bloody Angela on Chris to act as unpaid and uninformed minder.

  A general rule of life he’d usually found to be reliable: when faced with two alternative explanations of any given mystery, the more unpleasant one is more likely to be correct. Yes, he argued (more than a hint of desperation), but why me? Why pick on me to shepherd around a wanted fugitive with murderous fiends on her tail? Unfortunately, possible answers came flooding in as soon as he asked the question. Someone who moved around a lot in the course of his work; a moving target’s always harder to hit. Also, someone who came into contact with loads of different people on the outskirts of the magic biz; what if some of them were contacts, DS sleeper agents—he didn’t know any of the technical terms but he knew what he meant—what if going round with a travelling salesman was the perfect cover for a dissidemon trying to rally support among a network of hidden supporters? Revoltingly plausible, Chris thought; though if that was the big idea it clearly hadn’t worked, because the demons had got on his case straight away. And anyhow, he argued, Jill wouldn’t have landed him in something like this without at the very least mentioning it to him first-Yes, replied his inner barrister, but maybe that was the whole point; because if he didn’t actually know, the demons wouldn’t be able to force the information out of him when they captured and tortured him—extremely plausible, he had to admit, particularly since it had already happened, at Ettingate. The more he thought about it, the more inevitable it became. Jill, stuck with responsibility for the possible saviour of the human race, knowing that the orthodemons were breathing down her neck, desperately searching for someone she could palm the dissidemon off on, had thought of her oldest friend and said to herself, it’ll be all right, Chris won’t mind, he owes me about a billion favours going back fifteen years; he’s in love with me— Yes, but Jill wouldn’t do that to me.

  Chris’s inner barrister didn’t say anything. Didn’t have to. Yes, he thought bitterly, she bloody well would; if it was work, her job, something she truly believed was for the Greater Good. Ah yes, that old thing. She’d always been keen on it, even at school. If there was a charity red-nose day or sponsored pram-race or whale-saving leaflets to be stuffed through doors or anything like that, you’d always find Jill there, running the show, volunteering anybody who didn’t get out of the way fast enough. It was, in fact, the main flaw in her character: the sublime belief that nobody would really mind being put upon, bossed about and monstrously inconvenienced, so long as it was for a good cause.

  He’d never quite been able to figure out how an otherwise rational human being could think that way, but all the evidence suggested that in Jill’s case it was entirely possible. Saving the human race from an all-out war with the demons; well, yes, you could just about classify that as a good cause. Also, considering Jill’s track record, the closer someone was to her, the more readily that person sprang to her mind when she was casting about for someone to lumber. Not the first time it’d happened, either. What about the time when she could hardly sleep at night for fretting about the plight of the colony of Ibbotson’s moorhens threatened with loss of habitat by the proposed ring-road extension? And who’d been the first sucker press-ganged into lying in the mud in front of the bulldozers? Three guesses. Who’d been dragooned into picketing the school gates when Jill found out that the chip forks in the canteen were made from wood sourced from non-sustainable forests? Quite. From that sort of crap to landing him with a fugitive dissidemon with a price on her horns was one small step for an idealist.

  Pretending he was checking his rear-view mirror, Chris glanced at Angela as she sat in the passenger seat, arms crossed in front of her, a human knot. So, the theory was pretty damn plausible, but how would you go about proving it? A direct question was probably not on the cards, but how do you find out if someone’s really a demon in disguise? One of so many things, he reflected sadly, they never get round to teaching you at school.

  Frank Slade. Sunglasses. Of course!

  Have to go about it the right way, of course. He paused, took a deep breath, settled himself. First, set the scene; so he reached up and folded down the sunshade. Actually, it was cloudy and a bit overcast, but he hoped Angela wouldn’t notice. Drive on for a minute or so, squinting from time to time as though troubled by the brightness of the sun; then lean forward just enough to reach the glove compartment catch, open it, eyes firmly on road, scrabble about by feel, pull out the pair of sunglasses, stick them on his nose in one nice easy, fluid movement.

  He couldn’t bring himself to look. What if he actually was right and she really was a demon, albeit a comparatively nice one? He wasn’t quite sure he could handle that. On the other hand, at least he’d know for sure, instead of just harbouring nameless dread. Get it over with, he thought, and then it’ll be done.

  Chris shifted his head round ten degrees, just enough for a sideways glance.

  Not a pretty sight. Pale blue skin, hanging in sagging folds like that of an elephant or a rhino; two tusks jutting up from her lower jaw, meshing untidily with two companion upper-jaw tusks jutting down. Horns. Nothing you could legimately call a nose; the ears a bit like cabbage leaves after the caterpillars have been at them. As for her chin, it reminded him of one of those comically misshapen carrots you see at flower shows, in the Funny Vegetables category. For all he knew, to demon eyes she could be a real looker, but he’d really have liked to be able to wind down his window and throw up. That, however, wasn’t an option. Pity.

  Chris fixed his stare on the road ahead, waited a bit and then casually slipped off the glasses and stowed them in his shirt pocket. Aren’t there times, he thought, when you just hate being right?

  CHAPTER NINE

  The rest of the day’s calls slid past Chris in a kind of blur. Later, when he checked his book, he saw that he’d sold thirteen dozen love philtres to Arnott & Meyer (with that much of the stuff sloshing about the place, God help Tamworth) and a record seven dozen collapsible armies to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Hanley. Under other circumstances, that would’ve called for suitably raucous celebrations and several happy hours planning on how he’d spend his bonus. As it was, he couldn’t really work up any enthusiasm. It hardly seemed to matter any more.

  See you tomorrow, then, Angela had said as he dropped her off at the station, and as he let himself into the flat he shuddered at the prospect. There was the usual note from Karen—working late, defrost something—which he screwed into a ball and threw across the room. If she’d been there, he’d have told her all about it, just so he could share it with someone, and maybe just possibly get
some advice. As it was—

  He rang Jill and got a recorded message; tried her mobile, which was turned off. That exhausted the possibilities. Fine. If he was somehow going to get out of this mess, it’d have to be by his own unaided efforts. He whimpered out loud, and went to the kitchen.

  Chris had no idea how stuff found its way into his freezer. He never shopped, and he couldn’t remember Karen ever doing so. It wasn’t a JWW Retail Self-Fill (probably just as well, if the consumer feedback was anything to go by: the most recent batch had been recalled, and seven customers were still unaccounted for, though the recent discovery of a new constellation at the back end of the Orion nebula was surely just a coincidence); maybe there was some service Karen subscribed to that came round while you were out and restocked your freezer for you. She’d never mentioned anything like that, but Karen hardly ever mentioned anything these days.

  There was a makeover show on one channel and a rerun of The Exorcist on another; the story of my life, Chris thought, sardined in between DIY and malevolent fiends, and fed up to the teeth with both of them.

  He ate a microwaved Tesco lasagne, and mused: I may not have a clue, but I do have a telephone. I need to talk to someone.

  Who, though? Allies; one of the other reps, maybe, Jim Phillips or Jack Norris, experienced men who’d seen it all and still managed to make their quotas. Or Mr Burnoz, even; he must know something about it, since he’d been the one who’d brought Angela into Chris’s life in the first place. He actually got as far as picking up the phone and looking up Mr Burnoz’s number. That far, but no further. He simply couldn’t think of a way of telling his story without sounding like he’d completely blown his valves.