by Tom Holt
He spent the rest of the working day mooching around the sub-basement, just in case anyone came down there; they didn’t, and at five thirty sharp he left the building with the map in his hand. It took him an hour and a half, and when he got there it was just starting to get dark.
He was standing outside a large, utterly nondescript brick building, the sort you barely see. If you do happen to notice it, your brain tags it as warehouse and you forget it instantly; which is odd, because if you believe in all the TV cop shows and thrillers, 97.46 per cent of all murders take place in buildings like that, and 76.19 per cent of people who go inside them come out in a plastic bag.
He made himself look at it carefully, from a tactical viewpoint. There were big steel sliding doors at the front, high windows he couldn’t see anything through, a side door at the top of a flight of stairs, which he guessed might be a fire escape or something. He had no experience whatsoever with buildings like that – no owner’s manual, user’s guide or Large Brick Buildings For Dummies. Presumably, if you had legitimate business there, you went to the big sliding doors, which would be open during normal business hours; if you worked there and wanted to get in or out when the main doors were shut, you went up the stairs to the little door. He could only see the front, of course; there could be all manner of architectural delights, including but not limited to French windows, a portico and a colonnaded cloister out back, but unless he could find a way over the razor-wire fence, he had no way of knowing.
There were lights in two windows; one in the third floor, right-hand side; one roughly central on the fifth. Someone, therefore, was in there, though it could simply be the cleaner. He waited half an hour; no lights went on or off. He had the feeling he wasn’t making any significant progress.
I haven’t thought this through, he told himself. I haven’t got a Plan. I’ve committed acts of violence and intimidated two innocent strangers to find this place, and now I’m just a member of the public standing on a pavement. Maybe I should go home and get a grip. True, I’m probably under a moral obligation to do something, having possibly seen Stephanie inside a cardboard box that’s presumably somewhere inside that great big building, but people like me don’t do breaking and entering. In fact, now I come to think of it, I’m not sure what people like me are supposed to do in situations like this. Write to my MP, presumably.
People like you don’t kill dragons, or walk around with constant objects in their jacket pockets. That’s the point. You aren’t a person like you. You’re a—
He shuddered away the H word. No I’m not, he told himself angrily. And suppose, let’s just suppose for the sake of argument that I am. In which case, I ought to know about this sort of stuff: how to scale walls and jemmy windows, how to move noiselessly in the dark, how to find one cardboard box in a large warehouse in less than a month. There should’ve been at least some degree of vocational training, instead of which, I got maths, English, geography and computer studies. And I’m not a hero. I’m not even a plucky and determined hobbit. I could get killed trying to break into a place like that. Worse still, I could get arrested.
He waited another half hour, then made a mental note of the street name and went home.
The depot didn’t show up on Google Street View; the viewer jumped like a frog over the place on the street where he’d stood and stared at it, and squirmed and wriggled when he tried to make it go back. He found it on the satellite view, but there was an impenetrable black shadow masking it, presumably from the office block opposite. When he tried again later, the computer froze. He left it for an hour, came back and switched it off at the mains.
A week later, at the end of the eleven-thirty coffee ceremony, Mr Pecheur caught his eye just as he was about to leave.
“You’re wasting your time,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Not here. This way.”
He followed Mr Pecheur down a long corridor to a tiny, windowless room with one plain wooden table and two plastic chairs. “Sit down.”
He sat. Mr Pecheur lowered himself painfully into the other chair, folded his arms and looked at him for a while.
“You’re wasting your time,” he repeated.
“I’m sorry,” Maurice said. “Um—”
Mr Pecheur leaned forward a little. “All right,” he said, “I’ll go through it with you step by step. What do you do most days, after work?”
“Um.”
“No answer required,” Mr Pecheur said. “I know exactly what you do. You take a 67 bus to Sarras Road, then walk to Sangreal Street. Then you stand about for between thirty minutes and an hour and a quarter, staring at a brick building.” He shook his head. “Give it up,” he said. “Find something else to do. Watch TV. Join a male voice choir. Go out and get pathetically drunk. You’ll thank me,” he added kindly, “in the long run.”
Maurice gave him a blank look. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But what I do out of office hours—”
“Fine.” Mr Pecheur mimed washing his hands. “This is not an official interview. I’m talking to you as one human being to another. Listen to me. There’s no point to it. You’re barking up the wrong tree. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick. You’re crying over spilt milk, adding two and two and getting five, playing with fire, putting the cart before the horse and locking the stable door after the horse has bolted, you can’t see the wood for the trees, you’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater, you’ve put the telescope to your blind eye and you’re making bricks without straw. Do I make myself clear?”
“No.”
“You’re wasting your time.” Mr Pecheur took a deep breath, then counted to five. “You’re seeing a grand mystery where there isn’t one. You think there’s something going on, and there isn’t. Also, you’re risking our cast-iron reputation for confidentiality by drawing attention to a particular building you aren’t supposed to know about. Oh, and there’s been a formal complaint from our shipping contractors. Apparently you intimidated two of their people, causing them psychological trauma. The only reason you haven’t been fired is that we don’t fire people, ever.”
Maurice nodded. “Because I know too much.”
Mr Pecheur scowled at him. “Because, believe it or not, we’re too soft-hearted. Once, a good many years ago, the firm did give an employee three weeks’ notice, but then they decided they were being too harsh and gave him a second chance. That employee was me, by the way, thirty-two years ago. That’s why I haven’t mentioned any of this to Dave Nacien. I’m running a serious risk, not telling on you.”
“Really?”
“Sure. I’m still on probation. So, for my sake if for no other reason, give it up. You’ve got nothing to gain by it and quite a lot to lose.” He smiled. “The goodwill of your employers. Your job. Your mind. There’s nothing in there, Maurice. Just a lot of cardboard boxes that are no concern of yours. You do see that, don’t you?”
Maurice looked straight at him. For some reason, he wasn’t scared a bit. “I understand,” he said. “I won’t do it anymore. I promise.”
Mr Pecheur gave him a crooked smile. “Because you can see the merit of my argument.”
“Because it isn’t working, so I’ll have to try something else.” Maurice replied. “But thanks anyway.” He stood up, walked to the door, then hesitated and looked back. “What did you do?”
“Excuse me?”
“That nearly got you fired. What did you do?”
Mr Pecheur’s face froze. Then, like a grenade exploding, he laughed. “Oh, that,” he said. “No big deal. I fell in love.”
“Ah.”
Mr Pecheur nodded slowly. “With a beautiful girl I saw in a glass ball inside a cardboard box that split open when I dropped it. Shouldn’t have looked, should I? Of course, that was way back when. The firm was still in Battersea in those days.”
“Um.”
“So,” Mr Pecheur went on, “I tried and tried and tried not to think about her, but it wasn’t any good, so I cut the box open
– set off all the alarms, but what the hell – and asked her, How can I get you out of there? Simple, she said, all you need to do is burn down the building.” He lifted his head and smiled. “That’s why we’re not in Battersea anymore.”
Maurice stared at him. “And they didn’t fire you?”
“Ah well.” Mr Pecheur grinned at him. “The boss in those days, Mr Pelles, he felt sorry for me. You see, the roof fell on me, and I got squished up a bit. Also, I kind of got the impression he understood; like something of the sort had happened to him once, maybe? In fact… well, I’ve never asked, because you don’t, but I get the impression it’s not exactly uncommon, in this line of work. You see something in a box, and for a while you act a little crazy. I think the boxes…” He paused and frowned. “There’s something about them, I don’t know. Maybe it’s what’s inside them, or having so many of them crowded together in one place. They do something to your head.” A curious look crossed his face, and his manner was unusually intense. “Sometimes the boxes seem to tell you things,” he said. “When you’re alone with them down there. They tell you things, or suggest things, or they make you think you’ve seen something. The important thing is, don’t believe them. They aren’t necessarily telling the truth.”
It was a while before Maurice could speak. “So that’s why they didn’t sack you.”
“Partly,” Mr Pecheur replied. “Also, the building was insured for four times its value, and they owned the freehold. Luck isn’t a wheelbarrow, Maurice; it works better if you don’t push it. Stay cool, you hear?”
So he stopped going to Sangreal Street. Instead, he spent the evenings sitting in his chair with the constant object sitting on a shoebox on the table in front of him, looking at it. Sometimes it was a tape measure; other times it was a can-opener or an iPod or a tin of furniture polish; sometimes it was a small pewter statue of a leaping dolphin; for a constant object, it changed shape rather a lot, but never into anything particularly interesting. Just once, when he took his eye off it for a split second, he could’ve sworn it turned into a doughnut, but when he turned and looked straight at it, it went back to being a tube of superglue.
One afternoon, while he was searching for a spectacularly elusive box, Ms Blanchemains came by. She’d brought a sealed envelope, another rush job. He took it and went back to his search; it wasn’t until he’d found the box he’d been looking for that he realised she was still there.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
She sat down on the box he’d just found and offered him a Polo mint, which he refused. She shrugged, and ate one herself. “I’ve been asking myself that question,” she replied. “But on balance, probably not.” She crunched up the last of the mint and looked at him for a moment, her head slightly on one side, as if trying to see if he was properly aligned with the wall. “You like it here?”
“It’s all right.”
“All right.”
“There’s worse places. Overthwart and Headlong, for instance.”
She frowned. “They’re that import/export firm, aren’t they? Very big in coffee.”
“I never really figured out what they did. I just kept a computer company. It did all the work; I just…” He shrugged. “Not quite sure what I did, really. Anyhow, here’s much better.”
“Mphm. I like it here too. It’s good to know you’re doing work of real social importance, rather than just stirring the money around.”
He had no idea what that was supposed to mean. “Been here long?” he asked.
“Seven years.” She looked at the wall for a bit, then asked, “What are you doing here?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ll rephrase that. What is it that you do here?”
“Um.” He thought for a moment. “I look for things.”
“Ah.” She made it sound like he’d said something clever. “So that’s your job, is it? Looking for things?”
“I guess so, yes.”
“And when there’s something you can’t find straight away, do you just give up and try and put it out of your mind, or do you keep on looking till you’ve found it? Come on,” she added. “Simple question. No need to show your working or draw a diagram.”
“I keep looking.”
She stood up. “Is that right?” she said, and left the room.
He thought about what she’d said for the rest of the day. When he got home, he fired up his computer and started doing some research. It was time, he’d decided, to find out a bit about heroes and heroism.
Heroism, he discovered, is really nothing more than a means to an end, a way of getting things done. Your country is infested with monsters? You need a hero. The princess has been abducted by an evil sorcerer? Reach for the Yellow Pages and thumb through the pages beginning with H. Heroism is there to deal with the narrow but significant tranche of issues that lie between the purviews of the environmental health authorities and the military. It’s designed to tackle straightforward but strenuous problems, the sort that can be dealt with by young men of superior physique, moderate intelligence and above-average testosterone. You don’t send in a hero to clear up an impending catastrophe on the fixed income derivatives market, or grapple with the implications of peak oil. A hero’s role is to kill something or find something or retrieve something or get rid of something. In nearly all cases the job could be done some other way, but a hero is cheaper, quicker and more efficient. Heroes are for when you want the cat out of the tree, but without deploying helicopters or cutting the tree down, on a budget not exceeding $49.95.
Heroes, he discovered, were the simple souls recruited to do these rotten but necessary jobs; and the most striking thing about heroes was that, almost without exception, they could only exist within the framework of one of a limited number of narratives. These narratives were as fixed and inflexible as Inland Revenue procedural directives; they had to be, presumably, to keep the heroes from wandering off and getting lost, which they’d almost certainly do if allowed any latitude for initiative or creative thinking. Thus: the hero has his destiny revealed to him at an early age; he proves his true worth by battling with some supernatural creature; he seeks or has thrust upon him a quest, usually a task that at first sight appears to be impossible or at least exceptionally difficult, very often involving the rescue of a young female royal; despairing of being able to perform the task, he gets spoon-fed the necessary help by a wizard, minor deity or other supernatural nanny; in many cases, he’s also cosseted by being supplied with superior kit in the form of weapons or other advanced technology that give him an entirely unfair advantage and make his success practically a foregone conclusion; nevertheless, he still manages somehow to get himself into the most frightful mess, at which point the same or other supernatural helpers show up and bail him out, leaving him to complete the task and get all the glory.
Hm, he thought. Rings a bell.
Well, the weird people keep telling me I’m a hero, and you could make a case for my life having many of the elements of a heroic narrative. Is it possible that it’s all a case of mistaken identity? No, not that, as such; more a case of the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like, for example, a kidnapping, where the ransom’s left in a plastic bag in a trash can on a street corner at 2 a.m., and some drunk just happens to come along before the kidnappers can get there and collect, and the drunk takes the bag and the money? Only, in my case, I lucked out and got the life of Sir Lancelot rather than two million in used notes.
He’d heard weirder explanations. Once, a friend of his who did something nebulous and antisocial in the City of London told him that the credit crunch of 2008 was caused by the Bank of the Dead (the venerable institution in which a thousand generations of pious Chinese had made provision for themselves in the afterlife by burning huge quantities of paper money), which had caught the most frightful cold in the sub-prime soul bond market. According to his friend, the bank had bundled together parcels of sub-prime souls – naughty without being clinically wicked – into
dubious and complex financial instruments and sold them to the Evil One. This all came badly unstuck when Gary Suslowicz, twenty-six, of Portland, Oregon, dived into a freezing river to rescue a nine-year-old girl’s schnauzer puppy from drowning. So moved were a hundred million news viewers by Mr Suslowicz’s heroism that they resolved to turn away from their selfish, egocentric lives and instead live for others and the common good. As a result, they were Saved, which meant massive defaults on the bonds, leaving the Bank of the Dead in dire straits, which in turn infected the major banks in the Sunshine world who were in trading relationships with the BotD. All right, his friend had added, when Maurice expressed a degree of scepticism, it’s a tad far-fetched. But it’s a damn sight easier to believe in than what we’re told actually happened.
All right, how about multiverse theory? Let’s see. Somehow or other, without realising it, at some point in my youth I got lifted out of the universe where I belong and dumped in a different version of reality in which I’m a hero and the world is waiting impatiently for me to crack on and get the job done so that destiny can unfold according to the schedule pinned to God’s bulletin board. It’d have to be a pretty goofy, far-out version, of course – one in which there really is such a thing as destiny and fate and so on, and narratives, stuff like that. But there’s a case to be made that the universe I’m living in is pretty goofy: as witness (examples chosen purely at random) self-levitating doughnuts, dragons in the bedroom, the fact that someone gave me a job, George from school ending up a multi-billionaire, Stephanie in a cardboard box. None of those ought to be allowed in a universe you’d feel happy about sending your kids to school in. On the other hand, everyone around me seems to feel that it’s OK, more or less. There haven’t been questions in Parlia ment, or articles in the broad-sheets. Egocentric fool that I am, I’ve assumed that the eye of the weirdness whirlwind is centred on me, and by implication everywhere else is perfectly normal. Query that. Maybe what I’ve experienced is symptomatic of this not being the real reality; and that I’m the only one who’s noticed—