by Tom Holt
Sure. Actually, quite a few other people have come to the conclusion that the universe is crazy and they’re the only ones who are sane, but luckily for them there have been giant strides in medication and occupational therapy, so at least some of them may one day be allowed out on their own further than the end of the lawn. Meanwhile, it’s probably not a good idea to go around publishing such findings to a wider audience.
But let’s just suppose, for the sake of argument (actually, it’d call for something a bit more extreme; let’s suppose, for the sake of a blazing stand-up shouting match) that I really am a hero, that my job is to find Stephanie and rescue her, and that right now she’s somewhere in that big brick building in Sangreal Street—
Caution, my young apprentice. Think about what Mr Pecheur said, after his experience with a girl from a box. Sometimes they say stuff that isn’t necessarily the truth.
Yes, but I won’t find out for sure unless I go there and actually look. And, if I get there and Stephanie gives me a big smile and a can of gasoline and a box of matches, I’ll know Mr Pecheur was right. And if she doesn’t—
Get a grip, he urged himself. Nothing’s going to happen unless you can figure out a way of getting inside that building. And you can’t, can you?
Well?
The old man was troubled. He looked at the box and scratched his head. There was something about it that bothered him.
His nephew, supremely indifferent to his concerns, was eating a corned-beef sandwich. “Art,” the old man said, “I don’t like this.”
The young man chewed at him. The old man shook his head. “This box,” he said, “is the wrong size.”
The young man’s jaws stopped moving for half a second, then started again.
“How long we been collecting boxes here? That’s right, a long time. And all that time, all the boxes’ve been the same size. Identical. And now here’s this great big one. Know what I think? There’s something funny going on.”
The young man swallowed the last of the crust and felt in his pocket for the next sandwich.
“On the other hand,” the old man said, “there’s nothing in the contract says anything about how big the boxes got to be. And it’s in the usual place at the usual time. None of our business, is it? I mean, they don’t pay us to ask questions – they pay us to shift boxes. Am I right?”
If eating a sandwich can be taken as agreement, the young man was right behind him.
“And it’s not like there’s anyone we can ask,” the old man argued persuasively. “That’s the deal. We pick up the boxes, we take them down the depot, we don’t ask questions. Confidentiality, see. Absolute security. Name of the game, right?”
The young man frowned, scratched his ear and ate a Maryland cookie.
“Right,” the old man said decisively. “That’s it, then. Get that—” He looked round. The young man had got his phone out and was squashing keys with his enormous thumb. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll do it. You hold the door for me.”
The weight of the box actually reassured the old man, as he took the strain, lifted and staggered back. The boxes they were used to collecting were ridiculously heavy. So was this one. Therefore, this box was all right. Basic, fundamental logic.
“I just hope,” the old man gasped, when he’d finally wrestled the big box up the stairs, out through the front door and into the back of the van, “there aren’t too many more like that. Nearly bust a gut, I did, shifting that. All right, Art, settle down. Off we go.”
The rest of the run was pure routine: drive to the depot, stop at the gate in the wire fence, ring the bell, wait for the gate to open, back the van up to the massive steel doors at the side of the building, input the security code, stand well back as the doors whoosh open, unload the boxes, leave. The steel doors sighed shut behind them and clanged together like teeth.
In the loading bay, pitch darkness and dead silence, as usual, for about ten minutes. Then, something very unusual, though of course there was nobody there to see or know about it. A scrabbling noise, coming from inside the abnormally big box. Then a flash of light, a tearing sound, a loud thump and the single word fuck, spoken with true feeling.
For about fifteen seconds, Maurice couldn’t really feel anything. Then all that changed, and he could feel everything: every part of his body shrieking pain at him, accusing him of torture, false imprisonment, culpable negligence and weapons-grade stupidity. He hadn’t the heart to argue with himself, because all the charges were true.
Still, he thought, as the pins and needles in the back of his head (now there’s a collector’s item) slowly began to subside, I’m here now, so I might as well get on with it. Yes indeed. Get on with what? For a further seven seconds, during which he made the mistake of trying to flex his left knee, he couldn’t actually remember. Then memory seeped back, drip by drip: you packed yourself in a great big box so they’d bring you inside the depot so you could look for Stephanie. Really? I did that? Yes, apparently I did. Jesus wept.
He rolled onto his side and gradually extended his arms and legs. Each increment felt as though his tendons were ripping like old, frayed cloth, but gradually he felt each joint and sinew agree to forgive, if not to forget. You’re not entirely to blame, they told him. It wasn’t your fault that the old man couldn’t read, or didn’t think the words THIS WAY UP in big black capital letters applied to him, with the result that Maurice had endured the entire journey head down and feet up, with most of his body weight bearing down on the nape of his neck. On the other hand, he really shouldn’t have added FRAGILE, which every haulage contractor in history has chosen to construe as a hypothesis in need of trial by destruct testing rather than as a statement of fact.
Another question, one he’d been shying away from tackling since emerging from the box, was whether his experiences inside the box had irreparably damaged his optic nerve, or whether it was just dark. He’d actually had the foresight to bring a small flashlight, which had somehow survived the journey; he fished it out and flicked it on. Light. Oh good.
He switched it off again, just in case, and considered his next move. A bit late for that; but since he’d never imagined that his lunatic idea for getting inside would actually work, he hadn’t bothered formulating any plans for Phase Two. Just get in there and it’ll all be plain sailing. Yeah. Right.
His first outburst of illumination didn’t seem to have triggered any alarms or attracted any killer dogs, so he risked another, longer view, playing the flashlight’s pale-yellow beam around the immediate area. Boxes; loads of boxes, stacked on top of each other. That was all. If there were walls in this place, they were a long way away, or behind the box-ramparts. That in turn suggested he was in a very large room indeed – a warehouse or depot, to take a possibility entirely at random.
Even to a Carbonec employee in good standing, there did appear to be an awful lot of boxes. On the other hand, he had an advantage: he knew the box code, 8896431976N/ 6428914404W/3947582919W/9012348746W. Finding it among all these other identical boxes would be an uphill task for an ordinary mortal, but not perhaps as daunting for someone who did that kind of stuff for a living. If only he could find a light switch…
More research with the torch; no joy. It wasn’t so much trying to find a needle in a haystack as trying to find a cloaked needle in the intergalactic void between the Milky Way and Andromeda. He tried again and kept going for about three minutes, at which point the battery gave out and left him in pitch darkness.
Oh, he thought. Not that he was scared of the dark, good heavens, no. Perish the thought. It was just a dreadful, dreadful shame that the flashlight had given out, because unless the lights went on in, say, the next six seconds, he was going to start screaming and yelling, and—
A gentle blue glow welled up all around him. He swung round and saw that it was coming from a small plastic object, lying on the floor next to the mangled carcase of the box he’d just escaped from. Ah, he thought. To get out of the box he’d used the constant object.
When he’d slipped it into his pocket that morning, just before leaving home, it had been a pair of nail scissors. When he’d found it by feel a few minutes ago, it had felt bigger and squarer and sort of plastic-y; he’d pressed it against the side of the box, hoping it would somehow know what to do, and then there had been the flash of light, and then he’d been too preoccupied with pain to give it any more thought. Now, bless it, it was lying there in the shape of a chunky, mildly late-series-Star-Trek ray-gun thing, and a sort of bulb arrangement on the butt end was glowing delightfully blue.
He looked around. The space he was in – describing it as a room would be like calling the Second World War a difference of opinion – was a bit like a giant version of his sub-basement at Carbonec. There were rows and rows of shelves, on which sat thousands and thousands of boxes, each one with a label where a label should be. He walked up to the nearest row and let his peripheral vision brush along it, like a cat rubbing up against a leg – the special technique he’d invented. A lot of the labels were familiar, ones he’d memorised. A lot of them weren’t. That didn’t help terribly much – it could mean that boxes came here from more than one source, or they could be boxes that had been shipped out before he had joined the firm. He wasn’t really interested in that. More to the point, they didn’t seem to be in any sort of obvious order. Not alphabetical or numerical; not date order, because a box he remembered shipping the day before yesterday was right alongside another box from his third day on the job, while next to that was one whose designation rang no bells at all. Finding the Stephanie box, 8896431976N/6428914404W/ 3947582919W/9012348746W, would therefore be a matter of pure fluke.
Yes, but he did that sort of thing all day every day; he strolled down rows until the number he was looking for just happened to catch his eye. There were thousands of boxes in his sub-basement – not nearly as many as here, but still more than enough to make a normal, methodical person believe that finding one would be impossible – and yet he found them easily enough. The same principle might well apply here. Or it might not. Only one way to find out.
He concentrated. He concentrated on making his mind a complete blank, which is a difficult thing to do. He took the bucket of blankness and bailed out the floodwater of thought, until his vacuity level was roughly that of a delegate at a party conference. Then he stuck his hands in his pockets and began to stroll.
8896431976N/6428914404W/3947582919W/9012348746W. It practically jumped out and mugged him. He stopped dead. A little voice inside his head was urging him, Stay calm, don’t rush, no sudden movements or you’ll scare it away. Personally he thought that made no sense at all, but what the hell. He was getting used to his subconscious being rather better clued up about what was going on than he was.
Accordingly, he stood for a minute or so just looking at the box, like a man admiring a view. The box stayed perfectly still and quiet, so he moved towards it – not directly, bull-in-a-china-shop fashion, but obliquely, as though he was going to walk right past it without noticing it was there; then, at the last moment catching sight of it, like when you’re out shopping and you see someone you know and you’d really rather not have to talk to; you scuttle away but, at the very last moment, they see you, give you a cheery wave and call your name, and you’re lost.
He stopped. He was six inches or so from the box. Hello, box.
Gently, now. This is a situation that calls for empathy and understanding rather than haste and brute force; the boxwhisperer rather than the stevedore. Very slowly he reached out with his left hand until it rested lightly on the cardboard. He gave it a gentle pat. Maybe it winced ever so slightly, but he was probably imagining it. OK so far. Here goes.
When he pulled the constant object from his pocket, it had turned back into the X-Calibre letter-opener; great. Like a surgeon preparing for the first incision, he readied the tip against the packing tape, and—
Wham. Something hit his shoulder like a sledgehammer. He heard a tinkle, as the X-Calibre hit the floor.
“About fucking time,” roared a voice in his ear. He spun round, and found himself nose to nose with a man he was sure he recognised.
He was tall, spare, big-eared, curly-haired, mid-thirties, dressed in a long tweed overcoat with the collar turned up, and a Tom Baker scarf wound tightly round his neck and tucked in for maximum insulation. Apart from his mother, Maurice had never seen anyone angrier in his entire life.
“Max?” he said.
“At last.” Max was twitching, as though only an invisible security guard pinning his arms to his sides was keeping him from immediate violence. “Thank you so much for eventually deigning to turn up. It’s so very, very kind of you to find the time in your hectic fucking schedule.”
There are times in every life when you know you’re just about to say precisely the wrong thing, but you still go ahead and say it. On these occasions it’s like you aren’t actually involved; you’re more like an observer, watching from a safe distance through binoculars. “Um,” Maurice said.
“What?”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry.” Max’s fingers flexed and balled into fists. “You’re sorry. Well, that makes everything all right, then, doesn’t it? Just so long as you’re sorry, we can forget all about me being stuck here in this shithole for the best part of a thousand years. I mean, we can put it all behind us and move on.”
“Excuse me.”
“We can—What?”
“Did you say you’ve been here for a thousand years?”
Max frowned. “Well, maybe I’m exaggerating just a teeny bit.”
“Ah.”
“A more precise figure would be nine hundred and sixteen years, three months, four days and nine and a quarter hours. You bastard.”
“But—”
“Relative local time,” Max added. “Probably only a few months where you come from, but that’s not the point. You should’ve realised. You should’ve done something.”
“Um—”
“What?”
“I’m sorry.”
It was a bit like a nuclear weapons test, where they evacuate all the neighbouring islands, build the massive concrete blast walls, hold off on a warship twenty miles out to sea and press the button, only to discover that someone neglected to install the warhead. For a moment Max looked like he was about to disintegrate from pure rage. Then he sagged, shrugged and said, “Well, you’re here now. Let’s get on with it, shall we?”
“Yes, right.” Pause. “Get on with what?”
Or maybe they fitted it after all. “What? Finding my brother, of course. My brother,” he repeated, as Maurice did his impression of a blank sheet of paper. “Theo Bernstein. The man you’ve come to save.”
“Um.”
Yes, he’d said the wrong thing again. Curious, how such a little word could have such a big effect. Max stood up on the points of his toes, as if gathering himself up for a colossal Ali-Frazier punch, then staggered, caught himself just in time and leant heavily on Maurice’s shoulder to keep himself from falling over. “Theo Bernstein,” he repeated. “Oh come on. Theo Bernstein.”
“I’m very sorry,” Maurice said. “I don’t know who you—”
Max screamed, right in Maurice’s ear. Maurice hadn’t been expecting it; he jumped like a salmon, barging into Max on the way down and jolting him to the floor. Max sat up quickly and wriggled backwards away from him. “All right,” he yelled, “calm down, will you, for crying out loud? There’s no call for physical violence.”
Under other circumstances, Maurice would’ve been the first to agree. But his ears were still ringing, and Max was starting to get on his nerves. He bent down, retrieved the XCalibre and showed it to Max. “Know what this is?”
Max had gone a funny colour. “Yes.”
“Wonderful. I’m so glad one of us does. Look, I haven’t got a clue what this thing is or what it does, but I’m not afraid to use it, right? So, no more yelling.”
“OK.”
“Splendid. Now, I’m j
ust going to open this box here and have a look inside. When I’ve done that,” he added, as Max let out a pitiful whimpering noise, “you can tell me all about your brother and why he’s so important. Agreed?”
“Look, would you mind pointing that thing somewhere else? Like, they call them constant objects but that’s just marketing-speak, like Wonderkleen actually means, with any luck it won’t leave your clothes any dirtier than they were when you started. Actually, they’re pretty damn unstable, so if you wouldn’t mind—”
“Agreed?”
Max nodded. “Yeah, fine. Do what you want. But as soon as you’re done—”
“We’ll look for your brother,” Maurice said nicely. “Promise.”
All of Max’s attention appeared to be focused on the XCalibre. That was actually pretty scary, but Maurice didn’t have time to worry about that. He pricked the point of the knife into the parcel tape, took a deep breath and—
“I’m forgetting my manners,” Max said. “Have a bagel.”
“What?”
“A bagel. Fresh this morning. Go on.”
Maurice gave him a look that would’ve stripped paint, but Max just stood there, holding out a paper bag. Maurice sighed. Easier to accept than to argue. He took a bagel, then paused. “I thought you said you’d been trapped here for nine hundred years.”
“Nine hundred and sixteen years, three months, four days and nine and a quarter, no, make that nine and a half hours. So?”
“How come you’ve got freshly baked bagels?”
Max shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t that bad. You can order in.”
Maurice clamped the bagel between his teeth, found the point where he’d made his tiny incision and pressed down on the handle of the X-Calibre. There was a tiny moment of resistance, and then the tape gave way, the knife passed through, and—