by Tom Holt
He opened a desk drawer, rummaged about for a bit, then produced a small, battered brown cardboard box. He put it down on the desk. “No idea which of you it’s supposed to be for,” he said, “so you can fight over it between yourselves later. Well,” he added, with a sudden and startlingly beautiful smile, “that’s about it. Job done. You two had better get to your lessons, and I’m going to write my letter of resignation. And then—” The smile faded into a look of total clarity. “Well, who knows? Oh, I nearly forgot. Demonstration.”
Stephanie looked at him. “Sir?”
Mr Fisher-King grinned. “Apparently I’ve got to give you a demonstration of some kind,” he said, “just so you’ll know this is for real and not just me finally having the nervous breakdown I’ve so richly deserved for so very long. All right,” he added, “how about this?”
For some reason, the temperature in the room dropped like a stone. Mr Fisher-King stretched out his left hand, palm upwards; resting on it, suddenly, was a doughnut. Maurice shrank back a little. Stephanie, who liked doughnuts a little too much, leaned forward, but before she could pounce, the doughnut slowly rose into the air. It hung for a moment, wobbling almost imperceptibly, then gradually rotated, so that they were looking directly at the hole in the middle.
“All right,” Mr Fisher-King said very softly. “What can you see?”
Maurice looked. Through the hole, he thought he saw a city at night, a great city, in flames. In the orange glow of the sky, he could just make out three or four moving shadows, like birds, except no bird was, or could ever be, quite that shape. Then the glow turned into a blaze, so bright he had to close his eyes, and when he opened them again, he saw a black desert, an endless vista of dunes, which proved to be (the focus narrowed abruptly) tall heaps of wind-blown cinders, with the ends of fire-twisted steel girders poking out like ribs through a desiccated carcase. Then it all changed, and he saw an old man – himself – staring through the bars of a prison door, and then—
“Well?” said Mr Fisher-King.
“It’s a doughnut,” said Stephanie.
“Of course it is,” said Mr Fisher-King. Then he sighed. “Go on, then,” he said, and Stephanie’s paw shot out and secured it. Then she hesitated.
“You just made it appear,” she said accusingly. “Out of thin air.”
Mr Fisher-King nodded. “It’s perfectly all right,” he said.
But Stephanie was giving him a sour look; so he flattened his palm, and another doughnut appeared. He closed his hand around it, lifted it to his face and took a bite out of it. “See?” he said. “Perfectly all right.”
“How did you do that?” asked Stephanie, with her mouth full. “Sir,” she added.
Mr Fisher-King shook his head. “I could tell you,” he said, “but then you’d have learned something, and you wouldn’t want to spoil an otherwise unblemished record. All right, the fun’s over. Get out, both of you. No, just a moment.” He blinked, and settled his glasses on his nose. “What was it you two’re in here for? Oh, right, yes. Double detention, Friday, and don’t do it again. At least,” he added, “not until the third of March 2001, at the very earliest. After that, of course—” He shrugged, and gave them a feeble sort of grin. “Fine,” he said. “Now, get out of my sight, and don’t either of you ever come near me again.”
The cardboard box turned out to be empty. Stephanie kept it for putting small bits of rusty metal in. Nobody knew what she wanted them for and everybody knew better than to ask.
Hence, not unreasonably, here we go again. Thirteen years of not thinking about it, very hard; four thousand, seven hundred and forty-eight days on which he’d fought desperately to keep it from slipping back into his memory. Ah well. It takes thirteen years to climb a ladder, but only a few minutes to slide down a snake.
He thought about Stephanie instead. His other friend, the elegant woman had said, Steve in the army. The calling-herself-Steve thing was actually quite recent, since she’d been in the military, presumably a form of protective mimicry. They’d never once talked about when they’d gone to Mr Fisher-King’s study, although once, when she was home on leave, she admitted to him that she’d Googled Fisher-King and come across a Wikipedia article that she really thought he ought to read. He’d done so, and was forced to recall that, a mere eighteen months after Mr Fisher-King retired, they’d built a Morrisons on the big patch of waste ground out back of the sports centre that had been left derelict ever since they pulled down the old tyre factory. Spooky, or what?
He went home, checked his messages (none), wedged a frozen pizza in the microwave and opened a can of beer. Thirteen years ago, Mr Fisher-King had shown him destruction, war and death in the middle of a doughnut, which Stephanie had then eaten. Ever since then, his life had gradually soaked away into the sands of routine, and he’d almost reached the point where he was beginning to feel safe. Now this. He really wished Stephanie was back in the UK, so he could call her and not talk about it; but she was far away, up to her pale-blue eyes in carburettors and gearbox linkages. Face it, he told himself, you’re going to have to cope with this all by yourself, and the first step’s got to be, don’t think about it.
So he switched on the TV and got the news. Apparently there’d been some sort of appalling disaster at a science lab in Western Australia; a vast new multi-billion-dollar facility run by a multinational megacorp even he’d vaguely heard of had apparently disappeared, vanished, here-one-minute-gone-the-next, with not even a mile-wide glass-bottomed crater to mark where it had been. They were calling it the biggest scientific catastrophe since the Very Very Large Hadron Collider blew up the year before last, possibly even worse than that, except there’d been no explosion. Since nobody had a clue what they’d been doing there or how many of them had been doing it, accurate casualty figures were not available. One thing they could say for certain, however, was that there had been no survivors.
Maurice shrugged and switched channels. More news, same story. He flipped channels again. We’re interrupting our scheduled program to bring you the latest developments from Wooloomatta; cut to a bemused-looking woman holding a microphone, standing in a vast open plain covered in small blue flowers. The flowers were, apparently, the latest development. Nobody had seen them grow, but there they were, and – well, yes. Blue flowers, about fifty hectares of them, slap bang in the middle of the third most hostile environment on Earth. Cut to close-up of small blue flowers, which were OK, if you liked that sort of thing.
He frowned and switched channels, and got a documentary about the war in Afghanistan. The hell with that. He switched off and took a bite out of his pizza, which had gone cold. Not to worry; he really wasn’t hungry. He got up and went to bed.
Because he never remembered his dreams when he woke up, he opened his eyes about four hours later and had no idea what the extremely important message was that he’d just been given by someone whose name might have been Max, but already he wasn’t sure. He shook his head, groped for the light and realised it was already on.
Odd, because he remembered turning it off. He blinked. Also, his bedside light was ordinary light colour. The glow filling his bedroom was more a sort of pale orange.
Somehow or other, you instinctively know when you’re not alone in a room. How disturbing this realisation is depends a lot on context. For Maurice, who hadn’t had company in his bedroom for a depressingly long time, it definitely wasn’t good. His first instinct was to pretend he hadn’t noticed. You can be wonderfully calm about burglars if you haven’t got anything remotely worth stealing. Burglars, however, tend not to glow in the dark, for obvious reasons.
There was, nevertheless, a lot to be said for keeping absolutely still and quiet; mostly because he wasn’t sure he was capable of anything else, but also because, if he, she or it thought Maurice was still asleep, he, she or it might well go away again without bothering him. Fingers crossed. He waited, listening hard. He could hear breathing.
Understatement; a bit like describing the d
ecision to invade Iraq as a lapse of judgement. It wasn’t snoring exactly, because the rhythm was different. Maurice had absolutely no experience in this field, but it was the sort of noise he’d expect to be made by an elderly lion with a hundred-a-day cigar habit. Not human, at any rate. Oh hell.
At times like this, the mind loves to hide behind logic. Nothing on earth makes a noise like that; therefore, there can be no noise – you’re imagining it; close your eyes very tightly and it’ll go away. But Maurice was handicapped by his traumatic childhood experiences. He’d seen a doughnut materialise out of thin air on the palm of a man’s outstretched hand; he knew that weird stuff was possible. In particular, he couldn’t help remembering the viscerally disturbing winged silhouettes he’d seen wheeling and banking in the air above the city in the hole in the doughnut. Something like that, like what he’d always assumed those shapes had been, might well make just such a racket when breathing, because the ability to vent white-hot plasma through the mouth and nostrils must come at a terrible price in the ear, nose and throat department.
Oh, please, he begged the Universe. You can’t be serious. Amazing what indignation, even a tiny drop of it, can do for a person’s moral fibre. A moment ago, he’d been entirely preoccupied with terror. Now, with a little speck of rage at the bitter unfairness of it all to build around, oyster-fashion, he could almost feel himself growing a vestigial backbone. Dragons, he thought, how dare they. Crazy doughnuts and bizarre women were bad enough, but dragons—
He sat up and, although he could see perfectly well by the glow, turned on the light. At the foot of his bed, he could see what looked like a curled-up hose, only rather too thick for your everyday garden irrigator; also, it was covered in scales, for crying out loud.
Scales. Thirteen years of furious resentment welled up inside him and burst. “No!” he yelled. “I’m not having it,” but the curled-up heap of thing was still there, still glowing, still making that ridiculous noise. He was so angry he couldn’t have felt scared if he’d wanted to. Fumbling angrily for his slippers, he stumbled out of the bedroom and padded into the kitchen. Flinging open the drawer, he grabbed the bread-knife, muttered, “Dragons, for God’s sake,” under his breath and flumped back into the bedroom, to find the thing slowly oozing up off the floor onto his bed.
“No,” he snapped, “get off. Not allowed on the furniture.”
It lifted its head, or rather heads. There were nine of them, giving the thing the appearance of fearsome serpentine broccoli. Its eyes were blinking, not simultaneously; he recognised the bleary, not-quite-with-it look from his shaving mirror, but now wasn’t the time for sympathy in any shape or form. They had no right to make him do dragons, and he wasn’t going to stand for it.
Eighteen eyes were looking at him, with a who’s-been-sleeping-in-my-bed expression that he found impossible to forgive. For the first time in his wasp-not-swatting, spider-catching-in matchboxes-and-carefully-putting-outside life, he urgently wanted to kill a living creature. The fact that it was a minimum of twenty feet long, nine-headed and blatantly supernatural somehow didn’t seem relevant. Either it goes, said a voice inside him, or I do, and I’m not particularly bothered which.
At such times, ignorance can be your friend. Experienced professional dragonslayers – one immediately thinks of Ricky Wurmtoter, former head of pest control at J.W. Wells, or the legendary Kurt Lundqvist, thanks to whose efforts Seattle is now 77 per cent dragon-free – know the risks, the moves and the distressingly unfavourable chances of survival. Accordingly, they duck, weave, shuffle their feet, wait for an opening, feint, drop into an extended high guard, trip over something and get torched or eaten. Maurice, who had no idea what he was doing, neatly avoided all these pitfalls. He marched up to the dragon, yelled “Bastard!” at it at the top of his voice, and swung wildly with the breadknife. The dragon, quite reasonably anticipating a transition from high fifth to low third coupled with a defensive back-foot traverse, reared up and lurched to its right, collided with Maurice’s breadknife and neatly cut its own throat.
As he watched it slump, twitch and subside into a heap, he felt an overwhelming urge to apologise. But I’m so sorry or I didn’t mean it or even oops, butterfingers wasn’t going to cover it, he knew that. It looked so odd; so conclusively empty, like a pile of clothes lying on the floor where they’d been dropped. No point apologising, since there was so obviously nothing left to apologise to. He noticed his hand, lolling numbly from the end of his arm. The knife was still in it. He dropped it, then jumped smartly back to avoid lacerating his own foot.
I just killed a dragon. Yes, of course you did; now go and lie down and sleep it off. But there it lay, yards and yards of it, like a neatly coiled rope. Something dripped down his face. He had a shrewd idea what it might be, which he really didn’t feel like verifying. The anger that had made him do such an extraordinarily ill-judged thing was draining away like oil out of a vintage motorcycle, fading as quickly and completely as the dream in which someone whose name began with M had told him to do something, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what—
The phone rang.
He couldn’t quite bring himself to turn his back on the thing, so he reversed slowly through the bedroom door into the hallway and picked up. “Yes?”
“Hi. This is an important message. Did you know you could be saving up to thirty per cent on motor-insurance premiums? Yes, it’s true. If you’re—”
He put the phone back and wandered through into the bedroom. It was still there. Damn.
He went to the bathroom and washed the blood off his face. In the process, he got a tiny bit on his mouth and instinctively licked, then retched and spat, though rather too late to avoid finding out that dragon’s blood tastes oddly like marzipan. Then he returned to the bedroom. It was getting late and he felt very tired, but if he got into bed, he’d have that curled up at his feet. Just on the off-chance that he’d been mistaken, he took another look. Yes, still there.
This is ridiculous, he thought. I’ve just killed a dragon – there should be honour, glory, brass bands playing, a procession, half the kingdom and marry the princess. Instead, I’m going to have to sleep on the sofa, which means I’ll get a crick in my neck and wake up with a headache, which means I’ll be useless all day tomorrow, when we’ve got performance assessment reviews, and—
He caught sight of himself in the dressing-table mirror, and thought, It’s not going to be like that. Oh no. You can forget about going to work and performance reviews and just occasionally something nice, like a night out or a date. You’ve just screwed up your life beyond all hope of recovery. You killed it, for crying out loud. There’s got to be consequences.
Slowly he looked down. Still there, still unequivocally dead. I ought to call the police, he told himself. It’s got to be illegal, killing dragons; they’ll be a protected species or something, and then there’s health and safety, animal welfare – I’m bound to have done something wrong. Yes, fine, call the police and get it over with; hello, I’ve just killed a dragon in my bedroom. Bet they get calls like that all the time.
The last dim ember of resentment suddenly flared into light and heat. You bastard, he thought, how dare you; barging into my life and trashing it, and it’s no use whining about being dead because it’s not my fault – what was I supposed to do? And now of course you’ll be just as much trouble dead as alive, probably more so, and I just don’t need this right now.
Unasked, a gallery of desperate, hare-brained schemes broke on him like a wave. He could burn down the building – electrical fault; I warned them about that wiring, but would they listen? No, forget it; they’d find huge charred snake vertebrae among the ashes, and all he’d achieve would be to add arson to his box set of offences against the Wildlife & Countryside Act. Fine; I’ll pack a few essentials in a bag and just go away. How long would it take for a carcase to rot away into a skeleton? Ten years? Of course he’d have to go on paying the rent and everything, it’d be tight, but – yes, b
ut what about the smell? And rats; they’d have Environmental Health up here, and then it’d all come gushing out, and he’d be worse off than if he’d owned up in the first place. All right, he told himself, how’d it be if I called the police and said there was this loud noise, I went to investigate, someone hit me on the head, I woke up and there was this dead dragon on the floor. Me? No, no way, I didn’t do it; it was someone else. Yes, and a dog ate my homework. Wouldn’t be the first time.
(He grinned. Actually, the dog had eaten his homework, three or four times, and nobody had believed him, even when he took in a note from his mother. So, what chance would he have lying about something like this? Answer: none. Lying is a fine art. You need to practise, practise, practise, and he’d never had the patience.)
The phone rang again. He swore, stormed into the hall, grabbed it and yelled, “Piss off!”
“Maurice?”
Stephanie Wilson. “Stephanie? Is that you?”
“Steve,” she corrected. “Why are you swearing at me? That’s not very nice.”
“Where are you?”
“Home,” she said. “Two weeks’ leave, and then I’m off to—”
“Get over here,” he snapped. “Right now.”
“Mau—” was as far as she got before the receiver hit the cradle. He wasn’t prepared to let her argue, because she always won. But a command followed by a hang-up would annoy her so much she’d come round to yell at him. As a precaution, he tipped the phone off the hook.
Stephanie; thank God.
He stopped, and thought about that. The reaction had come as automatically as a sneeze. No doubting its authenticity, but why? He’d always been fond of Stephanie, on and off very fond indeed; how she felt about him he’d never quite been able to fathom. Mostly, the issue had never come to a head. As soon as the question became too big and too ornery to duck, she’d be posted somewhere exotic and that’d be that for six months or a year or whatever. Yes, he’d always secretly admired her strength, her steadfastness, her exceptional and often quite terrifying courage, but did he have any reason to suppose that she’d know what to do when faced with the consequences of a dead dragon in the bedroom? No reason. Just instinct and intuition. And, at the very least, she’d understand; or, at the very least, come closer to understanding than anyone else. After all, she’d seen the doughnut float, just as he had.