May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  Sigh. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s suppose for the sake of a completely pointless, time-wasting argument that you’re right. In that case, why have they been wasting their valuable time and energy on you, when you’re—no disrespect, you understand—when you’re just some human who goes round selling junk to shops?”

  He scowled as he answered: “Maybe it’s because I was at school with you. Both of you. Well, have you considered that? It’s a possibility. Maybe I do know where she is, like they keep telling me I do. Maybe—”

  Chris stopped himself before he could go any further; because if the flash of intuition that had burned patterns on the insides of his eyelids happened to be right, sharing it with Jill—who’d come here from Over There on purpose to do murder and her duty—might not be the smartest move ever.

  “Maybe what?”

  I got them in Debenhams. “Ignore me,” he mumbled. “Thinking aloud.”

  There was the strangest look on Jill’s face. “Thinking what?”

  “Oh, nothing. Can’t remember if I put the rubbish out this morning. Or is it the recycling today and the rubbish on Tuesdays?”

  A duck waddled towards them with a determined look on its face. It got as far as the edge of Jill’s shadow on the grass, turned smartly around and hurried back the way it had just come. “I’ve never lied to you,” she said. “You, though, I’m not so sure about.”

  “What? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, cast your mind back,” Jill said, in a soft but distinctly corrosive voice. “The last time we had a drink together. I left my bag in the pub, you took it on with you. There was a packet of biscuits—”

  “What?” He stared at her. “You’re not still banging on about those bloody biscuits.”

  Her eyes were cold and very sharp, like a needle in a syringe. “Actually,” she said, “yes, I am. You sure you didn’t eat them?”

  “Yes, of course I’m bloody sure. It’s not what you’d call a grey area.”

  “Fine. And Karen wouldn’t have.”

  “Karen doesn’t approve of biscuits. If it was up to her, she’d have them all lined up against a wall and shot.”

  Jill nodded slowly. “I believe you,” she said. “But if it wasn’t you, and it wasn’t her, and you haven’t got a dog.” Her focus narrowed even further; he could feel the points of her eyes sticking through his skull. “Someone or something ate them. Question is, who?”

  Chris felt a strong urge to run away. Odd, but real. “All right,” he said. “Look, does it really matter?”

  “Yes.” She’d spat the word at him; now she took a deep breath and calmed herself down. “Actually, yes, it matters a lot You see,” she went on, lowering her voice just a trifle, “they weren’t—well, ordinary biscuits.”

  Needlessly surreal, Chris thought. “Really.”

  “No.” Jill breathed out heavily and looked away. “They were bait.”

  Bait? Oh, right. “What, you mean, like rat poison or something?”

  “You could say that.” She was looking at the ducks, which were scampering towards the water as fast as their feet could carry them. “They were guilt biscuits.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Guilt biscuits. Massively emotionally charged. You put them in someone’s desk drawer when they’re on a diet. Once they’ve been there a day or so, assuming they haven’t been broken into, they’re absolutely steeped in guilt, longing, self-loathing and greed. Of course,” she went on, “the demon can’t digest the actual flour and sugar and egg and stuff, so I expect that somewhere in your flat there’s a big pile of crumbs, probably hidden away behind a sofa or something.” She turned her head and looked at him hard. “You’re absolutely sure Karen didn’t eat them?”

  She got them in Debenhams, Chris told himself, and they don’t sell enchanted magical talismans, just like Halfords don’t sell little dangly things that hang from your rear-view mirror and turn out to be powerful supernatural entities. “I just told you, didn’t I? Come on, think about it. When did Karen start at our school?”

  Jill frowned. “Same year as you and me.”

  “Right,” he said firmly. “So if she was the demon you were sent here to find, you’d have known all along. Damn it, how long have you known her? Surely if she was—well, one of your lot, you’d have known straight away, just one look at her. Like with the other girl, the one you—”

  But Jill was shaking her head. “Not necessarily,” she replied. “It’s not as straightforward as that.”

  Chris winced inwardly. Why wasn’t he surprised?

  “A demon can take human shape,” she went on, “like I did. But it’s quite a performance. Basically, you’ve got to be born human. If you want the technical stuff: you enter into the embryo in the nineteenth week, assuming there’s no complications. You displace the human, and there you stay until the human body dies. No, it’s not very nice, but please don’t pull faces at me, or I’ll see to it you stick like that. Anyhow, a demon who’s done that I can spot straight away, there’s an aura, a sort of puke-coloured glow that I can see and you can’t. But that’s not the only way.”

  “Ah.”

  “Quite.” Jill nodded. “In feet, it’s very rare, because why the hell would one of us want to be one of you without a really good reason? The other way’s far more usual.” She paused, rummaged in her carrier bag and took out a doughnut. “Completely stale,” she said, “but it’s been sitting on a plate on my secretary’s desk for four days. In human terms, it’d be Death By Chocolate with whipped cream and fudge sauce.” She took a savage bite out of the doughnut, and it seemed to restore her; she closed her eyes for a moment, breathed in deeply and out again, then spat her mouthful towards the ducks. They didn’t move. “A demon can piggyback on a human being,” she said, “by means of a carrier. It’s a bit like blowflies.” She stopped, burped, and went on, “They lay their eggs in open wounds. Demons can do more or less the same thing, only of course the wounds need to be emotional rather than just physical.” Suddenly she grinned; the grin of a hungry man thinking about food. “Only needs to be a scratch, so to speak, though it doesn’t stay that way for long. A demon can burrow its way into a little niggle of resentment, and then it digs in, makes itself comfy, and the carrier ends up with full-bore paranoia. Same with all your basic strong emotions, provided there’s something there to begin with that it can latch onto. And the trouble is,” she went on, “a carrier’s much, much harder to detect.”

  “Ah.”

  She nodded again. “It’s like an anchor,” she said. “Or a, what’s the word, one of those Star Trek things. A wormhole. The wound where the demon gets in is one end of the worm-hole, and the other end’s in a neutral dimension—let’s not get bogged down in that, it’s complicated and I know how much you struggled in physics at school, I don’t want to fry your brain with contraCartesian coordinates and stuff like that. Just think of it as Somewhere Else. What you’ve got is a kind of pied a terre; like living in a big house in the country and having a little flat in London for when you want to go to the sales or see a show. The demon doesn’t have to be there all the time—on this side, I mean—but whenever it wants to, it can just pop across and have somewhere to go. So, a person can walk around with a sort of demon holiday cottage planted in his head for years and years, and unless I happen to see the demon when it’s there I wouldn’t have a clue the person was a carrier; not without specialised equipment, at any rate.”

  Chris thought about that. It made a horrible kind of sense. “And you think Karen—”

  Jill was looking carefully at him again. “You were thinking the same thing,” she said. “For different reasons, obviously. But don’t you dare tell me the thought hadn’t crossed your mind.”

  He wanted to fight, but he was too tired. “It was just a feeling, I don’t know. Look, you’re not going to—well, do anything, are you? Only—”

  Jill laughed. “You mean kill her, don’t you? No, of course not. For one thing, I’ve told you
about a million times, I’ve changed sides. If Karen really is carrying the dissident ringleader, I’ll want to protect her, not kill her. Besides, you can take out the demon, if you’re careful, without harming the human carrier; though some of our lot aren’t inclined to put themselves out, if you follow me, especially if they’re in a hurry. Look,” she said, and though she hadn’t moved it was as though she’d just grabbed his wrist. “I don’t know if Karen’s carrying a demon, or of she’s involved at all. But if she is, and if the authorities back home are over here looking for the dissident ringleader—well, you’ve seen them for yourself, you must realise the danger you’re in, both of you. You’ve got to let me help you,” she said harshly, “and that means you’ve got to tell me everything. Do you understand?”

  Chris wasn’t looking at her. He was watching the ducks. Something about them wasn’t right at all. They were sploshing about weakly, swimming in circles. He forced himself to remember; she got them in Debenhams, she’d told him so herself. All this stuff about blowfly eggs and wormholes was just—

  “I’m not sure,” he whimpered (like he’d always said: pathetic). “It’s hard for me, it’s all so—”

  Jill’s eyes were holes he could fall into if he wasn’t very careful. “You can’t take my word for it,” she said. “You’ve got to see for yourself. Right?”

  He looked up. “Is that possible?”

  The way she laughed made him really wish he hadn’t raised the subject in the first place. “Oh, it’s possible, all right. It’s just not very nice. Still,” she added, as he started to say that that was fine, he’d cheerfully take her word for anything so long as she stopped looking at him like that (what great big eyes you’ve got, Grandma. All the better to eat you with), “you want to be sure. I can fix that for you. Just hold my hand,” she said, and it was like he’d caught his fingers in a car door, “and I’ll take you there.”

  “Are you sure it’s no bother?” Chris said weakly. “I really don’t want to put you out.”

  “No bother,” Jill said grimly as the sky came down on him like a boot on an ant and the sides of the world came rushing up to squash him. “Just one thing, though.”

  “Mm?”

  “If you don’t come back, can I have your Springsteen collection? It’s not for me, you understand, it’s for—”

  He was falling.

  Into her mind, yes; but he was also falling down a very real shaft with very real sides, and it was very familiar in a very real sense. She flushed me down a bog, Chris thought as he fell. The bitch.

  He fell a bit further, and thought: Alternatively, at Honest John’s, maybe he didn’t flush me down an actual real toilet. Maybe he just wanted to take me on a tour of his brain. Mind like a sewer, ha ha.

  He fell a lot further, and thought: so, if demons can’t actually shape-shift at will like I’ve been assuming they can, then both Angela and Karen are—

  He fell further still, and thought: assuming those specs that Frank Slade gave me actually do what he said they do. But hang on, though, Derek the Day-Glo person confirmed that, so it’s probably true—

  He fell even further, and thought: in which case, all these years I’ve been sleeping next to a demon. Yuck!

  And a bit further, and: and not just sleeping, either. Oh shit.

  Then he fell some more, and thought: that’s if I’m prepared to accept everything Jill said at face value. Am I? Well, yes, she’s Jill, and she’s never lied to me.

  And then it occurred to Chris (as he fell) that he was plummeting down an incredibly long shaft at a scarily fast speed, and unless the bottom of Jill’s mind was lined with a deep stack of thick, bouncy mattresses he most likely wasn’t going to survive; unless, of course, a hummingbird or something of the sort happened to fly up under his feet and—

  No hummingbird, just more falling. Oh, he thought; and then, a little later, after some more falling, he amended that to Oh well.

  (Assuming, he thought, as the sides of the shaft whizzed past his nose, I really am inside Jill’s mind and she didn’t flush me down a very real toilet pretending I was inside her mind. But what the hell, he thought: if you start questioning every bloody assumption, you’ll never get anywhere. Not that I’m anxious to arrive anywhere right now, not unless someone can lend me a parachute.)

  Oh well, he thought again, and fell some more.

  After he’d been falling for quite some time, Chris glanced at his watch. Then he fell some more. Then he looked at his watch again. Ten minutes later. Now that’s just weird, he thought as he fell.

  He thought: I can’t remember the exact formula but surely, if I’ve been falling all this time, when eventually I do hit the bottom, instead of just going splat, I’m going to punch a hole like a lead bullet through a steel plate. Probably come out in Sydney, still accelerating. Pity I’ll be dead, I always fancied seeing Australia—

  —He thought, but didn’t fall. He’d stopped.

  When had that happened? He’d been so preoccupied thinking about the harbour bridge and the opera house and wherever it was they filmed the soaps that he hadn’t actually noticed. But as soon as he was absolutely sure he wasn’t falling any more, a sign lit up out of the shadows and told him:

  You Are Here

  OK, he thought; but he was painfully conscious of hanging upside down, blood rushing to his head, vision starting to blur, unfortunate shifting of other bodily fluids inside his already overtaxed plumbing. He’d be ever so much more comfortable if only he could be standing on his feet instead.

  Chris didn’t move, but the world did; at least, it came to rest under his feet and pressed reassuringly against the soles of his shoes. Much better, he thought, thanks. And then, because it couldn’t do any harm to try, he said aloud, “Excuse me, but where is this?”

  There was someone standing next to him. “Fancy meeting you here,” she said. “No, don’t look round. I mean, you can if you like, but it’d be much better if you didn’t, for both of us.”

  Just when I thought I had a tiny fragment of a clue, he sighed to himself.

  “SatNav?” he said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Well of course,” SatNav replied. “You did ask where you were, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “There you go, then. At the end of the tunnel, turn left.”

  Chris tried closing his eyes and counting to ten, but only got as far as three. “What are you doing here, SatNav?” he asked, in a sort of snarly whimper. “This is Jill’s mind, she doesn’t even—”

  “No, it’s not.” She laughed; a silvery tinkling laugh, like a mountain stream. For two pins, he could’ve strangled her. “This is home. Where I live.” And then she said, “Thank you.”

  The two words he’d been least expecting. He blinked, as though she’d just handed him a fish.

  “Oh,” he said. “Right.” And then, “Why?”

  She laughed. “For setting me free, of course.”

  Well, of course. Silly him for not guessing. “Did I just do that?”

  “Yes.” There was something in her voice, the loosing of a ferocious tension. It had dissipated entirely when she went on, “Well, I’m here, aren’t I? So, yes, I must be free. Thanks,” (tacked on with a sort of soupy breathlessness that put him on edge right away), “to you.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m pleased about that.” Chris wanted to leave it there, but couldn’t, quite. “Free from what?”

  “Slavery.” Melodrama. “Imprisonment. I was trapped in that—in that box, and now I’m here, where I belong. I really should be very grateful.”

  Someone who chooses her words carefully. “Where exactly is this, then?” he said. “I thought I was in Jill’s mind, but you’re saying—”

  As Chris spoke, the faint light grew stronger and he could make out walls, a floor and ceiling. And cubicles. And washbasins.

  “Now you know where you are,” SatNav said. “Though properly speaking, of course, you shouldn’t be here at all.”

 
; I’m not the only one, he thought. “This is where I think it is, right?”

  “Yes. Now, if you had one of those watches that shows you the date as well as the time, you’d be able to see when you are as well as where. But that’s OK,” SatNav added cheerfully, “because I’m here to tell you.” And then her voice shifted just a little; her business voice, and she said:

  “You have now arrived at your destination.”

  Insight, a bit like a First Great Western train, gets there eventually. “At Honest John’s,” Chris said, as much to himself as to her, “I wasn’t flushed down a toilet, was I, I was flushed up.”

  “Congratulations. And you worked that out all by yourself.”

  “I was supposed to end up here.”

  “Correct.”

  Chris could hear something; a long way away, echoing, like a voice in a tunnel. “Can you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  Someone in a panic, yelling a name. His name. Jill’s voice. “Excuse me,” he said, “but does Jill know I’m here?”

  “Afraid not,” SatNav said, and he didn’t like her tone. “She wanted to show you the inside of heir head, so you’d know she was telling the truth. But—” Little laugh. “I guess you must’ve slipped her mind. That’s all right, though. This is where you’ve been headed, all along. Just as well you’ve got me to point you in the right direction.”

  “Here?”

  “If I were you,” SatNav said pleasantly, “I’d duck into one of those cubicles and lock the door. It’d be really embarrassing if someone came in and saw you.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Really,” she said firmly. “It was bad enough when you were fifteen. If they catch you now, they’ll probably stick you in jail and throw away the key.”

  She had a point, at that. Chris hurled himself into the nearest cubicle and slammed the door.