When It's a Jar

by Tom Holt

  It was suddenly bitterly cold. The old man sniffed, and wiped his nose on his left cuff. “Temperature, Art?”

  The young man was holding a little grey plastic box. He glanced at it and mumbled something Maurice didn’t quite catch; the old man clicked his tongue and said, “Right, better give it another five.” The young man did something to the grey box. The doughnut quivered slightly.

  “Here we go,” the old man said happily. “Always knew we’d get there in the end.”

  Maurice didn’t want to look, but the hole in the middle of the doughnut was staring at him, like an eye, and he couldn’t resist. He looked, and saw—

  “Better give another one and a half, Art, just for luck.”

  —The corner of the old man’s sleeve, and behind it, coils of dead dragon. He wanted to yell for Stephanie, but something told him she’d chosen not to be there, so it wouldn’t do to summon her against her will. He breathed out slowly, and his breath was white fog.

  The doughnut blinked.

  “That’s the ticket,” the old man said. The hole seemed to be getting bigger, though the doughnut somehow stayed exactly the same. The view through it was different. Now, Maurice could see—

  “Steady,” the old man said.

  —Nothing at all. He felt his eyes twitch and water, as if he’d got grit in them, or as if he was staring straight into the sun. Nothing at all; that didn’t make a great deal of sense. Behind him he heard a faint crunch; he swung his head round. The young man was eating a Crunchie bar.

  “Easy does it, Art,” the old man was saying. “That’s halfway, now – Art, for crying out loud, can’t you stop stuffing your face for just two minutes? Sixty per cent. Sixty-five.”

  And still there was nothing, nothing whatsoever, in the eye of the doughnut, although the grains of sugar on the outside were beginning to twinkle like Christmas-tree lights. Then Maurice caught his breath. Was it his imagination, or could he see something, tiny but distinct, in the very centre of the hole?

  Desperately he tried to concentrate. He saw a man, mid- to late thirties, dark curly hair, wearing a big knee-length tweed overcoat and a big scarf. He was sitting huddled on the ground, his hands wound up in the scarf, and he was shivering. Somehow, although the image hadn’t grown, it grew clearer. He saw the man’s face and somehow it was familiar. He could almost put a name to it. Maurice; no, that’s me. Mike; no, not like. Mervyn; nobody’s called Mervyn. Matthew? The man turned his head, frowned, as if he was staring into a small, distant hole in which he could see an obscure image. He had one of those good-looking faces you’d be extremely reluctant to lend money to.

  “All done,” the old man said. The doughnut flipped back onto its side and dropped onto his palm; he handed it to the young man, who gobbled it down in one. Suddenly, it was warm again. The dragon wasn’t there anymore.

  “Piece of cake,” the old man said.

  “What…?” Maurice pointed at the bed. Not even any bloodstains.

  The old man was putting things away in his pockets. “Right, then,” he said. “Was there anything else?”

  “The dragon. What happened to it?”

  The old man gave him a sad smile. “Sorry,” he said. “Can’t tell you that. Regulations. If they thought we were disclosing restricted information to unauthorised personnel, they’d have our ticket like that.” He stooped down, peered at a perfectly clean pillow case, shrugged and straightened up again. “Touch and go there for a second or two, but it all came right in the end. Right then, Art, switch off. The batteries cost a fortune,” he explained. “That’s if you can get ’em. So,” he added, broadening his smile. “Is everything to your satisfaction, then?”

  No dragon. No indication that a dragon had ever been. “Yes.”

  “That’s what we like to hear, isn’t it, Art? Well, hate to dash but we’d better be on our way. Rushed off our feet, we’ve been lately. You were lucky we could fit you in.”

  Maurice followed them to the door. Stephanie was nowhere to be seen. Still, she’d said she’d pay, and presumably they wouldn’t want cash in hand on the spot. He could ask her for a cheque later, and everything would be—“Um,” Maurice said.

  The old man’s hand was on the handle of the front door. “Sir?”

  “Um,” Maurice repeated. “What do I owe you?”

  The question seemed to puzzle the old man, who looked at him for a moment. “No, that’s all right,” he said. “All taken care of.”

  “What?” Hope exploded in his heart like a firework. “You mean there’s no charge?”

  The old man managed to keep a straight face. “Er, no, sir,” he said. “I mean, there’s nothing else to pay.” He paused, as if trying to figure out if Maurice had got it yet. “On top of what you paid already, I mean.”

  “Just a moment.” Maurice frowned. “I haven’t—”

  “Um, yes you have. Well,” the old man said briskly, “time we weren’t here. You’ll be getting a receipt in the post. Glad we could help. Come on, Art.”

  “I haven’t paid you anything,” Maurice said.

  “I think you’ll find you have,” the old man said gently.

  Something in the way he said it terrified him. “What? How much? What did all this cost me?”

  “Oh.” There was a hint of fear in the old man’s eyes. Not fear of what Maurice might do to him; more the reverse. “The usual.”

  “How much?”

  “Just the young lady, sir. Good Lord, is that the time? We’re going to have to get a wiggle on if we’re going to catch that flight. Art!”

  “What did you just say?”

  The old man looked at the door. He was figuring out the geometry of the situation. The door opened inwards, and Maurice was in the way. He was, in other words, trapped and couldn’t just make a run for it. He took a deep breath. “The young lady, sir.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s the payment.”

  For a moment, Maurice had no idea what he was talking about. Then it hit him, and made him stagger. As luck would have it, his involuntary backward step just about cleared the arc the door would have to describe in order for the old man to get through it. He seized his chance, grabbed the door handle, yanked the door open, darted through it like one of those tiny, almost transparent tropical fish they keep in dentists’ waiting rooms, and slammed it behind him as he left. Maurice, who seemed to have mislaid a few of his basic motor functions as a result of the shock, wasted valuable seconds fumbling with the handle. By the time he made it out onto the landing and yelled, “Come back!” the old man was well away. Maurice gave chase, but arrived at street level just in time to see a battered old white van veering away from the kerb, pulling enough Gs to black out an experienced test pilot.

  Max, said a tiny voice in his brain. The man you saw in the centre of the doughnut was called Max. He wants you to—

  But Maurice wasn’t interested in that right now. The young lady; she’s the payment. In return for getting rid of the dead dragon, they’d taken Stephanie—

  Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself. True, he hadn’t seen her since the two of them arrived, but that didn’t mean anything. Besides, they’d both been in plain sight all the time, or nearly all the time. True, he’d lost sight of the young one for a minute or so towards the end; but seriously, was he asking himself to believe that he, the serial sandwich-gobbler, had somehow managed to overpower Stephanie, carry her downstairs and stow her in the van? Quite. He’d been tall, but Stephanie was almost as tall and considerably more powerfully built. Fourteen years ago, he’d made the mistake of accepting a challenge to arm-wrestle her, and it’d been a week before he could hold a cup of tea. And that was before her combat training. At the very least, even if the kid had pulled a gun on her and she hadn’t made him eat it, she’d have made a racket they’d have heard in Edinburgh. Going quietly simply wasn’t in her nature. No, he told himself firmly, I must’ve got that all wrong. Silly misunderstanding, worrying about nothing. So I’ll go
back up to the flat, and there she’ll be—

  So he did that, and there she wasn’t. Not in the hall, living room, kitchen, bedroom or bathroom. Not hiding in the fitted wardrobe or under the bed, and those were the only two places you’d be able to stash something that size. Fine; she’s nipped out to get Chinese, or a pizza from the all-night shop, and all I’ve got to do is sit quietly and wait till she gets back.

  He did that. He did it for a very long time. Then he called her. Her voice assured him that, although she couldn’t talk to him right now, she’d get back to him as soon as possible. Meanwhile, if he cared to leave a message—

  “Stephanie!” he yelled, and put the phone down. It was all he could think of.

  It’s all right, he told himself the next day. While I was in the bedroom with the two weirdos, she must’ve got a call on her mobile from work, something urgent or hush-hush or both; she had to leave immediately, without letting me know. I’ll get a call from her in the next twenty-four hours, and then everything’ll be fine.

  It’s all right, he told himself the day after that (but he was lying; everything was far from all right. He was a complete mess, from not sleeping and not eating, and people had to say things three times before he snapped out of his daze and answered them). She was called away on active service, and right now she’s some place where you can’t make phone calls, but as soon as she can, which will be very soon indeed, she’ll call, and everything will be—

  On the third day, he formally acknowledged that it wasn’t all right, not by a long chalk, but there didn’t seem to be anything at all he could do about it. He tried Googling Rockchucker Disposal, but no dice. Eventually, after a lot of begging and pleading, he got a list of his most recent calls from the phone company, from which he was able to confirm that Stephanie must’ve rung the people she’d got Rockchucker from on her mobile rather than his landline. He rang Stephanie’s old home number, but her parents had moved years ago, leaving no forwarding address. He rang the school and asked if they could put him in touch with Mr Fisher-King, and they said, Who?

  It was round about then that the little voice started talking to him inside his head. The little voice said, Well, you’ve done everything you could. It wasn’t much, but it was everything, and you’ve got absolutely nothing at all to go on, so…

  After a while he found he could get rid of the little voice by humming loudly. This caused him severe problems at work, where humming was frowned on, so he had to put up with it during office hours. It started saying things like, Since there’s absolutely nothing you can do – and obviously, if there was something you could do, you’d be honour-bound to get right out there and do it, no matter what the cost, that goes without saying, of course; but since there’s nothing you can do, maybe you should look on the bright side; namely, the dragon’s gone, looks like nobody else noticed anything, it’s been a week, ten days, a fortnight, a month and no comeback, no consequences; you got away with it, you lucky bastard, and the thing about luck is, it’s not a wheelbarrow, you really don’t want to go pushing it. So, since nobody else knows Stephanie was ever at your place that night, and nobody knows about the dragon, and nothing bad’s happened (apart from Stephanie vanishing, of course, though you don’t know for certain she’s vanished – for all you know she could quite easily be alive and well running a top-secret underground car park in Helmand province), and since moping around feeling guilty and depressed is going to get you fired any day now, and where are you going to find another job, a loser like you, and since there really is not a damn thing you can do, not that you don’t want to but you’ve got to be realistic about this; well, you might just as well put the whole thing out of your mind and carry on like nothing’s happened.

  He hated the voice. Partly it was because it sounded just like him, and he’d always loathed the way he sounded. Partly it was because he knew it had a point, several of them, like a porcupine, and that sooner or later he was bound to give in and do what it said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. Meanwhile, he spent his evenings engaged in frantic research, calling everybody he still knew who might still know the people Stephanie used to know, in the increasingly vain hope that someone might say, “Oh right, you mean Steve; yes, I saw her yesterday – she’s fine.” But all he got was the news that she was in the army now, in Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran or one of those places.

  Time passed, and each day was more or less the same as the others. Each day, he got out of bed with the eagerness of a tooth pulled from its gum, rattled to work on the Tube, somehow avoided getting fired from nine to seven thirty – things were so bad with the firm nowadays that there was practically nothing to do, which meant everyone was staying later and later not doing it, in a desperate attempt to show that they alone were indispensable – before drooping home to spend another evening on the phone getting nowhere at all; and the more nowhere he got, naturally the harder he tried, which left precious little time for trivialities such as food preparation and housework. So he slept in a sleeping bag in the living room and picked up a hamburger at the Golden Arches on his way home.

  “Would you like fries with that?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to make that a Meal?”

  “No.”

  “You know what? You’re not being very heroic.”

  He blinked, and for the first time looked at the life-form behind the counter. “Excuse me?”

  “You’re not being very heroic,” the server repeated. According to her name-badge she was Yasmin: about nineteen, and probably rather nice looking if she smiled, which she showed no indication of doing. “You’ve given up, haven’t you?”

  “Uh?”

  “You’ve given up.” She’d raised her voice very slightly, as though he was deaf. “A hero would’ve moved, like, heaven and earth to find her. You’re standing in line for burgers.”

  Oh hell, not again. He gave Yasmin a cold scowl. “On second thoughts, I’ll have a chocolate shake with that.”

  “Regular or large?”

  “Regular.”

  “Coming right up. A hero,” Yasmin went on, “would make it, like, sort of a quest. Like, you’d go all round the place looking for her, know what I mean? A hero wouldn’t just quit.”

  “Fine,” said Maurice. “Now, let me guess, you’ve got a special on doughnuts.”

  She shook her head. “No, but you can add a Smarties McFlurry for just ninety-nine pence extra. A hero would have hope, you know?”

  He smiled icily. “I’m not a hero.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not,” he repeated, “a hero.”

  She looked at him, as if to make sure he was who she thought he was. “Suit yourself,” she said. “Talking of which, I can individualise your burger with added dill pickle and red sauce for just fifty pence.”

  “No.”

  “You want to get a grip,” she said, and went away to fetch his burger.

  He thought about that, the next day and the day after that. A hero, Yasmin had said; well, that ruled him out. According to multiverse theory, there’s an infinite number of universes, somewhere, in which every possibility is realised; but he found it very hard indeed to conceive of a universe in which he could ever qualify as a hero, regardless of circumstances. True, his destiny had been foretold, he’d killed a dragon and his one true love (now hang on just a moment) had been abducted; yes, he replied, my point exactly. That’s precisely the sort of stuff that’d bring out the latent heroism in anyone, always assuming it was in there to start with. And had it? No, absolutely not. His actions, or rather his total lack of action over the last three months, demonstrated it conclusively. Not a hero. Not a single heroic molecule in his whole body. And was he upset about that? No, absolutely not, for the same reason he didn’t cry himself to sleep every night because he knew he could never be Father Christmas. And as for that one-true-love business, you can forget about that right now. Simply not true. Absolutely.

  So he started buying
his evening meal from KFC instead, and that seemed to do the trick, because nobody there tried to badger him into a quest or remind him of his destiny, and although he missed the chocolate shakes, the Dippin’ Strips meal was just about the right size, if he added a side of coleslaw. And anyway, he thought, you’ve got to bear in mind that times have changed, and the new technology’s altered our perceptions of everything. Yes, if I was a hero in the Dark Ages or whenever, I’d be going from door to door, castle to castle, wattle hut to wattle hut, asking, Have you seen a girl about so high, red hair, attitude, shoulders like Tyson? And since population levels were so much lower back then, I could probably have scoured the entire south of England in three months. But instead, because this is now and we have the technology, I’ve been phoning round and Googling and going on Friends Reunited, which is basically the same thing, except I do it from home. No different really, no less valid; it’s heroism for the Facebook generation, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. And, more to the point, the net result is exactly the same. No dice. Nothing. That’s the point.

  One day, though, he was so preoccupied with not thinking about Stephanie and the dragon that he stayed on the train an extra stop. Accordingly, he walked home a different way, which happened to take him much closer to the Golden Arches than the KFC; and he was hungry, and it was raining, and life is too short. So, very cautiously, he put his head round the door and took a good look before joining the queue. It was unusually short, and before very long he was facing a short, square young man called Kevin.

  “Hi,” Maurice said. “Yasmin not in today, then?”

  “Who?”

  Maurice smiled. “I think I’ll have the Filet-O-Fish,” he said. “With large fries and a large vanilla shake. Perhaps you could be very kind and make it a Meal.”

  Kevin nodded and went away, and came back shortly afterwards with the usual paper bag. “Here you are,” he said. “Would you like to make it a Feast for just an extra ninety-nine pence?”