May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  Which left him with probably the biggest and most inscrutable weirdness of the lot, namely SatNav, soi-disant princess of the Fey; completely and utterly reliable if you wanted to get from Stirchley to Walsall without getting bunged up in the rush-hour traffic, but not necessarily to be trusted implicitly on other subjects. True, he had reason to doubt what Jill had told him, but he had other, more reliable witnesses who said the same as she did, and all that stuff about the Fey and dreams and music—

  I’m missing the point, Chris told himself. There’s something else I’m not even considering, and it’s the key to everything. Something simple—

  “It shouldn’t have to be me,” he said aloud. “Sod it, what did I do?”

  He made an effort to pull himself together. Come along now, he said to himself, you’ve taken a day off work to get all this stuff sorted out, you’d better get a move on. Now, where to start?

  It was like those join-the-dots puzzles, when he was a kid; people gave him books full of them, because children really enjoyed them, it challenged their young minds and meant they’d grow up to be astrophysicists. He’d hated them, of course. His was a mind that hated challenges of any kind—which socks shall I wear today, which channel shall I watch?—and he contemplated the vast, sprawling nature of the problem and despaired. Never was any good at unravelling bits of tangled string, either. Fine, he thought.

  There are two ways of solving a mystery. Either you start off by examining all the evidence, evaluating it carefully, winnowing the fallacies from the things that were capable of being scientifically proved, then sorting the facts into a rational hypothesis which you then test by experiment and dialectic enquiry to arrive at the truth; or, you ask somebody.

  Chris picked up the phone, dialled, waited, gave a name, waited some more, and then said: “Jill? What the fuck is going on?”

  There were ducks, of course. There had to be. Probably wouldn’t be valid without ducks. Ask John le Carre or one of those people.

  Jill, who’d obviously done this sort of thing loads of times before, had brought stale bread to feed them with. She tore a finger-and-thumb pinch out of the heart of the loaf and threw it into the water, which immediately churned and frothed into a seething, duck-crammed maelstrom.

  “I told you,” she said. “You’re absolutely right. It’s me.”

  Chris looked at the ducks, not at her. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

  “No, never. For crying out loud, Chris, we’ve known each other since we were tiny tots. And when have I ever—?”

  “Loads of times,” he snapped.

  “Balls. Name one time I’ve lied to you.”

  “Right.” He took a deep breath. “There was the time I really fancied Amanda Mizzen, and I asked you if you thought she liked me, and you said—”

  “I was trying to be nice.”

  “You lied, though,” he said. “You said yeah, go for it. And look what happened. She poured warm custard in the pocket of my blazer.”

  Jill nodded. “True. But strictly speaking, I didn’t lie to you, I gave you advice. Bad advice,” she added quickly, “I grant you that. But I never actually said yes, she fancies you rotten, she told me so herself. Now did I?”

  Chris frowned. “All right, then,” he said. “What about the time when—?”

  “Let me rephrase that,” Jill interrupted briskly. “When have I ever lied to you about something not utterly trivial and unimportant?”

  He thought for a moment, then said: “Fair enough. But there’s always a first time.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning,” he said, with a sudden spurt of anger, “you might have bloody well told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “That you’re a—” He didn’t want to say it it’d sound silly. “That you’re not strictly human.”

  “That.” She shrugged. “You never asked.”

  “Jill—”

  “All right, all right.” She raised a defensive hand. “Well, for one thing, you’d never have believed me. Now would you?”

  “Maybe I would’ve,” Chris lied defiantly. “If you’d, I don’t know, proved it somehow.”

  “Yeah, sure.” She gave him a little frown. “Besides, I think you ought to consider it from my point of view. I’ve never been—well, comfortable about it. There’s some things you don’t tell anybody, even your very best friends. Aren’t there?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” Jill grinned suddenly. “Like, you never told me about Pongo.”

  “No, of course— Hold on,” he said angrily, “how the hell do you know about that?”

  Her grin broadened. “Pongo was your cuddly stuffed rhino,” she said. “He slept on your pillow till you were fourteen, and you couldn’t go to sleep unless he was there. Bless,” she added vindictively.

  “That’s different,” he said. “That was, well, private.”

  “And being a non-human with carnivorous tendencies wasn’t?” The grin turned into a smile, but there were still loads of teeth in it. “Just a hint of double standards creeping in here, don’t you think?”

  “Pongo wasn’t important,” Chris replied sullenly. “I mean, he wasn’t going to suddenly jump up and start savaging people with his razor-sharp fangs, was he? And you haven’t answered my question. How did you know?”

  Jill shrugged. “Saw him in your eyes,” she replied. “It’s a knack we’ve got. Sometimes, if you look closely, you can see a reflection there. Anyhow, that’s beside the point. I never told you because it was private. And, naturally, I was afraid it’d spoil everything. With you lot. My friends. Well, it would’ve done, wouldn’t it?”

  Chris scowled. “Not unreasonably,” he said. “I mean, all the while we thought you liked us, and really you were just feeding—”

  She threw another handful of bread shrapnel into the heart of the duckstorm. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what friends do. They nourish each other. It’s what friendship is.”

  One duck was treading on another duck’s head, trying to get at a chunk of stale crust. Presumably they were friends too. “Maybe,” he said, in a rather strained voice, “you were taking that idea a bit to extremes.”

  “Not really,” Jill replied briskly. “Friends supply each others’ needs, and in return, they give back. I got what I needed, and in return I was always there, for all of you. Don’t say it hasn’t been a great help over the years.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It has,” she said fiercely. “You know it has. All through the difficult times, the living hell of human adolescence, I was there looking after you all, listening, nodding, making little sympathetic noises. Talk about a shoulder to cry on; if I’d been human, I’d have caught pneumonia.”

  “You were lapping it up,” Chris snapped back, “literally.”

  She was still and quiet for a moment; then she shrugged. “All right, so I wasn’t completely selfless and altruistic. You were all still my friends. I—” She frowned, then added. “I liked you. Really. You have no idea what that was like, for one of my lot. We don’t do that, you see. We don’t like. We don’t like, the way you humans don’t walk through walls. It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s just that we can’t. But suddenly I found out that I could, and it was—well, nice. That’s when I decided there had to be a better way.”

  He looked at her. Deep in his head, his inner Poirot was waving and pointing at something, but he took no notice. “Is that right?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. In that case, tell me exactly what happened, that time in the girls’ toilets.”

  For a long time, Jill didn’t move or speak. Then she tore up the remaining bread into little bits. “Watch this,” she said, and threw the bread into the water. The ducks didn’t move. The bits of bread floated for a few seconds until they grew waterlogged and sank.

  “I can do that,” she said. “I can control other living things, up to a point. Either because they’re very stupid, like ducks or rug
by players, or because they aren’t aware that I’m doing it. I can do it, but I don’t. It’d be cheating.”

  Chris thought for a moment, then said: “I’ve only got your word for that.”

  “Yes, but I never lie to you.”

  He nodded. “So,” he said. “What really happened?”

  To begin with (Jill said), I wasn’t the—what did you call it? The one who is to come. Did you think of that all by yourself, or—? No, I thought not.

  No, that wasn’t me. Quite the opposite. Actually, allow me to introduce myself. My number is 666A, and I—well, I used to be a vice-marshal of the diabolic host. Sounds impressive, but actually it’s kind of somewhere between postmaster general and president of the War Graves Commission. And that was OK; I was a career civil servant, working my way gradually up the ladder, the way you do. Pretty much like I’m doing now, in fact. Like we say, you can take the demon out of the office, but you can never take the office out of the demon. Anyway, that was me.

  And one day I got called in and was told they wanted someone for a long-term undercover mission: to find the dissident leader and, well, take her out. Not really my cup of sulphur, but they dropped some heavy hints about promotion and doing my career a lot of good, so I said yes, please, when do I start? And the next thing I knew, I was being born.

  It was hell being brought up as a human. I knew that the most important thing was not blowing my cover; as in, grabbing hold of the first human I saw and tearing its head off just so I could taste the rich, creamy fear. That would’ve ruined everything, they told me, and I wasn’t to do it. Which was fine; but it meant that all the years I was growing up, I was starving hungry all the bloody time. Absolutely famished, like being on one of those diets where all you get all day is one glass of carrot juice and a stick of celery. The only way I could keep going was by constancy having rows and tantrums with my parents—

  Yes, that’s right. They haven’t spoken to me for years, and I can’t say I blame them. Happiest day of their lives when I left home, and the last I heard of them they were crossing the Nullarbor Desert in a camper van. I feel sorry for them now. I can’t have been very nice to live with.

  I knew my people had put me in the right place at the right time; all I had to do was wait till the dissident leader showed up, and I’d know her right away. For a start, she’d be one of us, so she’d stick out like the proverbial sore talon. Soon as I located her I was to zoom in, do the job and then I could bug out and come home. I couldn’t wait.

  And then, at the start of the summer term in year twelve, there was that new girl; you remember...

  “Actually,” Chris said, “there were two new girls. There was—”

  “Don’t interrupt,” Jill said.

  There was that new girl, and as soon as I looked at her, I could see she was one of us—my lot, A demon. That’s got to be her, I thought, thank God for that, I can do the job and go home. Hooray, I thought.

  What was her name? Ellie something. Like it matters; it was an assumed name, obviously, and anyway, I’ve always hated names—well, I guess you know why, by now. I’ve had to learn to endure them, but each time I say one or hear one, it still burns me, like putting your hand on a hot stove. Anyway, there she was, and it was just a question of biding my time, choosing the right moment, making the kill and getting out.

  Easy enough, you would have thought. I could just have walked up to her in the playground and bitten her head off-God, I really wanted to do that after all those years of living off emotional lettuce, finally the chance of a nice, juicy steak. That’s what I was expected to do, it’s what my training was all about, it’s what I should’ve done. But—don’t ask me why—when it came to it, I just couldn’t. Not like that, in plain view of everybody. I guess I’d been around humans too long, I’d got soft or gone native, something of that sort, I don’t know. Maybe I’d learned fear from the humans: it’s not something that exists back home, but once you’re this side of the line it’s terribly easy to start believing in it. Whatever the reason, I didn’t just crack on and get it over and done with. I kept putting it off, making excuses. Didn’t want to draw attention, didn’t want to cause an incident, afraid there might be repercussions for other ex-pat demons on the human side of the line.

  All just excuses, naturally. But I didn’t do it straight away, and you know how it is. The longer you put off doing something, the harder it is to do it. I started getting memos, notes, messages on my phone from the authorities back home. I was quite clever about fobbing them off, but I knew I couldn’t keep it up for ever.

  Eventually I realised I couldn’t hold out any longer. I chose a day and said to myself, right, on this day, at eleven-fifteen precisely, I’ll do it. And, as luck would have it, at eleven-fifteen precisely, Ellie whatever-her-name-was went into the girls’ toilets, and I followed her. I didn’t know my friend Karen was in there too; I definitely had no idea you were there. I went in, grabbed the stupid cow’s hair and slashed her throat. Job done.

  “You?”

  Jill shrugged. “Me,” she said. “You got a problem with that?”

  “Well,” Chris said slowly, “Yes,’I suppose I have. It was—”

  “Justifiable homicide, as far as the authorities were concerned,” Jill said firmly. “Quite possibly justifiable pesticide. At least, that’s how it would’ve been seen back home, if only—”

  She’d stopped talking. Chris waited for as long as he could bear, then repeated, “If only—?”

  If only (Jill continued) I’d killed the right demon. But I hadn’t.

  Well, quite. Didn’t I ever feel stupid. As soon as the fuss was over and I could get somewhere private where I could report back, I called in and said, job done; and they said, no, sorry, you’re wrong there, our scans clearly show the continued existence of the dissident ringleader. In other words, I’d killed the wrong person. By some amazing coincidence there was more than one undercover demon at our school, and I’d made a simple, basic, bloody stupid mistake.

  You can imagine how I felt. No, scrub that. You can have absolutely no idea how I felt. I don’t know which was worse, the excruciating guilt or the feeling of being a complete dick-head; they were both pretty bad, and as far as I was concerned, that was it. No more, I said to myself, I’m through with all that. Quite a big decision, as you’ll appreciate. It meant I could never go back home, for one thing. Also, I’d betrayed everything I’d always believed in. Well, hot quite that. What I’d mostly believed in was the importance of a good job with security and prospects. I’d screwed that up too, of course. I’d screwed up more or less everything. But no way was I going to go back out there and try again. My first thought was; make a clean break, change sides. Throw in my lot with the dissidents; that way, with there being a slim chance they might win the civil war, I had some kind of hope of going home one day. But that was a wash-out. I mean, the authorities were quite adamant that I’d killed the wrong demon, but the fact remains that immediately afterwards all traces of subversive and dissident activity stopped, just like that. I hadn’t killed the dissident ringleader, but the effect was pretty much the same as if I had. We’d won.

  Correction: there was still one dissident on the loose. Me. The thing is, you don’t just tell the demon authorities where they can stick their job and then walk away whistling a show tune. As soon as they realised I wasn’t planning on coming home, they put me on top of the most-wanted list. Also, I’d changed my mind, really and truly. I was absolutely appalled by what I’d done, actually. I thought, this simply can’t be right, killing people, under any circumstances. It’s all very well to talk about it when you’re hovering safely in the insubstantial world, where there’s no blood to spill or flesh to rip. Actually doing it is—

  Anyway, I made my decision. I was converted. If demon-kind’s got a future, it’s through non-violent, non-aggressive emotion-farming; and if the real dissident ringleader was too scared and too spineless to carry on simply because of one bungled assassination attempt,
then I’d take over the job and do it myself. Which is what I’ve been doing, basically, ever since. That’s why I joined Delendi Sunt, why I’ve worked so bloody hard to get where I am today; as soon as there’s any sign of demons coming over here to feed, I send my people out and put a stop to it, and let me tell you, I’ve made a difference there, a real difference. I can sense when they’re getting ready to come across, you see, which none of my predecessors could. Attacks down seventy-five per cent since I took over, and I make bloody sure my bosses know it. They like me a lot. But my standing orders to my field operatives is, bring ‘em back alive, if they know what’s good for them. I tell them it’s so that the demons can be safely and humanely disposed of. What I actually do is put the fear of God into them and send them home again. They don’t tend to come back after that.

  “So you aren’t her after all.”

  Jill gave Chris her extra-special exasperated look. “Haven’t you been listening? Yes, I’m her. I’m the leader of the dissident movement, currently in exile on your side of the line. I’m the one they’re trying to find, which is why they’ve been coming after you; because they can smell me on you. What’s so difficult to understand about that?”

  A token of how weird his life had been lately that Chris didn’t react particularly to that last question. Instead, he said quietly; “You aren’t her, though. Well, are you?”

  Jill trying to stay calm; an impressive sight, seen through binoculars. Close up, just plain scary. “If you mean I’m not the one I was originally sent here to kill, yes, you’re quite right. But she’s disappeared, like I just told you. Nobody’s heard so much as a twitter out of her for sixteen years. She doesn’t matter any more.”

  But Chris shook his head. “If I’ve got this right,” he said, “sixteen years is nothing to your lot. Time doesn’t even work properly where you come from. You may have forgotten that, because you’ve been over here so long, but I don’t suppose they see it that way.”