by Tom Holt
“Oh.” Sophie’s eyes widened. “Oh, you thought—”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
The two clerks had gone bright pink, and were pretending to be utterly fascinated by a scrap of cobweb in the corner of the ceiling. “So it was you who—” Paul said.
“That’s right.”
“Because you—”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
Of course, what he should probably have done was throw his arms around her and say, “But you didn’t have to, I love you anyway.” But he didn’t do that. Instead, he wobbled, grabbed the back of his chair to keep himself from falling over, and said, “Bloody hell.” He realised while he was saying it that it wasn’t quite the most felicitous speech he’d ever made, but by then it was too late.
Sophie was staring at the scrap of rug visible between her feet. “I suppose I ought to say sorry,” she said.
“Sorry?” Paul echoed helplessly.
“Yes, all right, I know it’s not going to do a blind bit of good saying sorry, and obviously you’re going to hate me for ever and ever, but—”
“What’s there to be sorry about?” Paul said. “That’s wonderful.”
Over her shoulder, Paul could see the two clerks cringing. The hell with them, he thought. “No it’s not,” Sophie insisted, “it’s a total disaster, and it’s all my—”
“For God’s sake, Sophie. Shut up.” He jumped up to go to her, caught his foot in a fold of the rug, and fell heavily against Pip’s knees. Pip yowled with pain, and lashed out reflexively, hitting Paul on the nose with the heel of his hand. Then Sophie hit Pip with a chair.
“What the bloody hell’s going on?” said a bewildered-sounding voice from over by the window. All of them swung round, and saw the goblin, Mr Tanner’s mum, sitting up on the bed and staring at them.
Well at one of them.
“Arthur?” she said.
The clerk called Arthur gaped back at her; and then something seemed to click into place.
“Rosie?” he whispered.
Paul wasn’t completely on the ball, what with the angels singing and the bluebirds zooming about overhead and the sun coming out from behind the clouds and all that sort of thing, but he could still hop to the more obvious conclusions; and the manner in which the curly-haired clerk whose name was Tanner and Mr Tanner’s mum hurled themselves into each others’ arms with a crash like a lorry hitting a pillar box seemed to suggest he wasn’t too wide of the mark, at that.
“Sweetheart!” sobbed the clerk.
“Honeypetal,” crooned Mr Tanner’s mum.
Sophie nudged Paul in the ribs. “What the hell’s going on?” she whispered.
“Shh,” Paul replied. “Apparently, that’s our Mr Tanner’s dad.”
“But she’s a—”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
Paul shifted slightly, so as to avoid any risk of seeing what Mr Tanner’s mum and Arthur the clerk were getting up to. “Forget about them,” he said. “Did you really put that stuff in my tea?”
“Yes,” Sophie said. “Look, would you mind not going on about that? Only—”
“Only what?”
She frowned. “Oh, what the hell,” she said, and kissed him.
Compared with what was happening on the other side of the room, it was no big deal. Children and people of a nervous disposition could have witnessed it with no lasting damage. As far as Paul was concerned, however, it was without doubt the most amazing thing that had ever happened in the whole history of the universe; so it was hardly surprising that the other clerk, Pip, had to tap him on the shoulder several times before he managed to get his attention.
“Excuse me,” said Pip, “but would you mind awfully not doing that? I mean, if we’ve got to spend all eternity cooped up in here together—well, for one thing, I’m going to feel just a bit left out, if you see what I mean.”
All eternity; just then, Paul couldn’t see anything particularly wrong with all eternity being much like the moment he’d been interrupted in the middle of. Even so, he could see Pip’s point, and so, apparently, could Sophie. The same couldn’t be said of Arthur and Mr Tanner’s mum, but there didn’t seem to be a lot that any of them could do about that, even with buckets of cold water.
“I suppose we could use the curtains to close off that half of the room,” Sophie said. “But that wouldn’t solve the problem of the noises—”
“I heard that,” growled Mr Tanner’s mum. “Should be ashamed of yourselves, bloody perverts. It’s all right,” she added, “you can turn round now.”
Paul wasn’t so sure about that, and stayed where he was. “Sorry,” he said. “Only—”
“Yes, all right, I get the message. More to the point, we’d like a bit of privacy, if it’s all the same to you. I think we need to get out of here.”
“Really,” Sophie said. “What a brilliant idea. Maybe you could tell us how.”
“Sarky.” Mr Tanner’s mum sighed. “Actually,” she said, “it’s dead easy for you two.”
This time, Paul did turn round. “What? How?”
“Not so fast,” Mr Tanner’s mum replied. “First, you’ve got to promise me you’ll come back and let us out.”
“Yes, of course,” Sophie said. “So what’ve we got to do?”
“Simple. I’m assuming you’ve both had your little chat with Ricky Wurmtoter?”
It took a second or so for Paul to figure out what she was referring to. “Oh, you mean when he gave us—”
“The prefect badges, that’s right,” Mr Tanner’s mum said. “He’s a good boy, young Ricky, he’ll have you out of here in two shakes. Just press the badge and yell help, and you’ll be back in the office before you can say employers’ liability insurance.”
Sophie was fumbling for her badge already, but Paul hesitated. “Back in the office,” he repeated.
“That’s right. Simple counter-inversion, same as you’d use if you’d lost your car keys.”
“Fine,” Paul said. “But if we go straight back to the office, how do we rescue you? The door’s still on the train.”
Mr Tanner’s mum hadn’t thought of that. “Shit,” she said.
Long silence; during which Mr Tanner’s mum sat down in the big armchair with her head in her hands, while the two clerks stood by looking embarrassed. Finally, Sophie said, “Well, I can see that’s awkward for you three, but really, that’s no reason why Paul and I’ve got to stay here. Look, when we get back, maybe we could ask Mr Wurmtoter if he knows how to get you out of here. Or we could go to the lost-property office at Euston, see if this door thing gets handed in. What is this door thing, anyhow?” she added.
Mr Tanner’s mum called her a rude name. Sophie replied in kind, and things would probably have got rather fraught if Paul hadn’t said, “Excuse me,” three times, followed by, “SHUT UP!”, once.
“I’ve had an idea,” he said.
§
Much to Paul’s surprise, it worked.
Not that he enjoyed it, not one bit. The counter-inversion got them back to the office just fine, but the sensation—the nearest Paul could ever get to describing it was a bit like being sneezed out of God’s nostril, only backwards—was no fun at all; neither, though in a different way, was hurtling through the clouds ten thousand feet above the ground on the back of Mr Wurmtoter’s milk-white winged horse. Sure, it was fast, and it seemed to know the way without having to be steered or anything; and he supposed, as they soared over Birmingham at several times the speed of sound, that it was nice of Mr Wurmtoter to lend them the horrible animal. On balance, though, he’d rather have walked.
The horse dropped them both on the platform at Stafford just as the train started to pull in. It didn’t hang about, and for some reason or other, all the other people on the platform were looking the other way. As soon as the train came to a halt, they shoved through the nearest door and ran down the corridor, just in time to see the portable door being shovelled int
o a cleaner’s black plastic sack. Paul hesitated, but Sophie pushed past him, snatched it out, grabbed Paul by the arm and dragged him off the train just as it pulled away.
“There,” she said, as they stood panting on the platform. “Now will you tell me what this stupid thing does?”
So Paul told her. Her first reaction was to be bitterly hurt and offended that he hadn’t mentioned it before. He had no reply to that. But there was one thing he had to say, before they went any further.
“Listen,” he said. “If you want to, you can go back in time—I’ll stay here and keep the door open for you—and stop yourself putting that stuff in my tea. If you want to, I mean. If you’ve thought better of it, or something like that.”
She looked at him, with rather more of the old Sophie in her expression than he’d have liked. “Why?” she said.
“Oh, I just thought—”
“That’d be stupid,” she interrupted. “Because then we wouldn’t have been trapped in that strange room, and we’d never have found those two clerk people, and so they’d never have a chance of being rescued, so they’d have to stay there for ever and ever, and that disgusting goblin woman would never get her boyfriend back, and—” She stopped. “And anyway,” she went on, “I’d still love you, even if I didn’t spike your tea with the philtre stuff. So there wouldn’t be any point, would there?”
“No,” Paul said. “I just thought—”
“Don’t,” Sophie said. “Right, you’d better do whatever it is you do with this thing. And hurry up, people are staring.”
This time, Sophie stayed behind to make sure the door was kept open. Paul went through, and sure enough, there was the room, more or less as they’d left it, except that the two clerks and Mr Tanner’s mum were sitting round a table playing cards. For some reason, neither of the clerks was wearing any clothes.
“Strip canasta,” Mr Tanner’s mum explained, as the two clerks dressed hurriedly. “You were gone such a long time, we had to find something to do to amuse ourselves.”
“Fine,” Paul said. “Now, can we get a move on, please?”
“Spoilsport,” Mr Tanner’s mum said, and she led the way, followed by Arthur, followed by Pip, still struggling with his bootlaces. But when Arthur tried to cross the threshold—“I’m stuck,” he said.
Mr Tanner’s mum clicked her tongue. “For crying out loud,” she said, “this is no time for stupid jokes.”
“It’s not a joke,” said Arthur in a tragic voice. “I can’t move. I’m stuck.”
Mr Tanner’s mum reached out a long, scaly arm, grabbed him by the elbow and heaved. Arthur yelled like a cat being skinned alive, but didn’t budge.
Mr Tanner’s mum went a pale shade of aquamarine. “How about you?” she asked Pip. “You try.”
But Pip couldn’t pass through the door either. “It’s that bastard Humphrey,” Mr Tanner’s mum snarled. “He’s put a lock on the flicking door.” Then she sat down on the platform tarmac and burst into tears. Paul and Sophie looked at her, then back at the door. It had snapped shut, gone limp and fallen off the wall.
They tried to set it up again, but it wouldn’t stick; it just kept rolling sadly down again, like misbehaving wallpaper. Eventually, they saw a guard approaching with a policeman, and decided it was time to leave. The last thing they needed, they decided, was for Mr Tanner’s mum to start disembowelling people in broad daylight in a public place.
“It’s a lock,” Mr Tanner’s mum explained, as they walked slowly down the street away from the station. “Just like any other sort of lock, except it only affects certain people, the ones you want to keep in, and of course you can’t see it.”
“Fine,” Paul said. “So if it’s just a lock, is there a key?”
“Sure,” Mr Tanner’s mum said, with a grim laugh. “The problem’s finding it. Obviously, that bastard Humphrey’s got it, and you can bet your knicker elastic he won’t have left it lying about. It’ll be in a very safe place, you can rely on that.”
They sat down on a bench under a tree. Mercifully, Mr Tanner’s mum had abandoned her goblin shape in favour of something a little bit less ostentatious—only marginally, as the whistles she prompted as they passed a building site amply testified. Paul assumed she was only doing it to annoy Sophie. Successfully.
“Actually,” Mr Tanner’s mum went on, “it’s worse than that, because there’s two keyholes on that stupid door thing, so there’s got to be two keys, which means it’ll be twice as hard tracking them down. And,” she continued gloomily, “knowing Humphrey they won’t be nice straightforward knobbly bits of brass, either, they’ll be disguised as something, or there’ll be some sort of stupid test you have to pass or thing you’ve got to do before you can get at them or make them work. He’s a terror for that sort of thing is Humphrey. I remember when we first got the hot-drinks machine, and he put a spell on it so only the pure in heart could get it to do coffee, milk and two sugars. I told him, I said, pure in heart, around here, you must be—”
“Just a moment,” Paul interrupted. “A test, you said.”
“That’s right. Or there was the time when he fixed the fax machine so only the seventh son of a seventh son could change the toner cartridge. Now it just so happens that Ricky Wurmtoter is a seventh son, but of course he’s not always around, a lot of the time he’s off on a job somewhere, and it’s bloody inconvenient—”
“A test,” Paul repeated. “Like in fairy tales and stuff.”
“Yes. And—”
“Or folk tales. King Arthur and so forth.”
“Yeah, he loves all that crap. Just a big kid, really. Nasty spiteful bloody kid, but—”
“King Arthur.” Sophie’s eyes were wide as saucers. “The sword in the stone.”
Of course, Paul hadn’t been to Sophie’s house before. It was pretty much as he’d imagined it: double-glazed porch, tie-backs on the curtains, glass-topped coffee tables, stripped-pine kitchen units. Sophie’s parents weren’t quite the hopelessly obsolete museum-pieces she’d led him to expect; he rather liked them, in fact, especially the way that neither of them was particularly fazed when Sophie introduced her companions (“This is, um, Rosie, her son’s one of the partners; oh, and this is Paul, we’re in love”) as she pushed past on her way to the back door.
There on the grey-paved patio was the other sword in the stone, an exact duplicate of the one he’d grown used to sidestepping every time he crossed his bedsit floor to make a cup of tea. Neither rain, wind nor blue tits had marred its glowing hilt or shining blade. Mrs Pettingell had tied one end of the washing line to it.
“We’re still back where we started, though,” Sophie pointed out. “I’ve tried and tried, and so has Dad, and we can’t shift the stupid thing out of the stone.”
Mr Tanner’s mum nodded. “Like I said,” she replied. “It’ll be a spell, or an intelligence test. Humphrey’s a right bastard, but he’s good at what he does.”
Sophie thought for a while, then suggested going round to B&Q and buying a jackhammer. Mr Tanner’s mum didn’t think much of that idea; and while they were bickering about it in a fairly half-hearted fashion, Paul suddenly thought of something. Gilbert and Sullivan, he thought; also, two hearts are better than one.
“Just a moment,” he said, putting his hand on the left branch of the crossguard and beckoning Sophie over. “Here, you catch hold of your side, and when I count to three—”
It came out so smoothly that they nearly fell over; and, sure enough, the very tip of the blade wasn’t sharp and pointed—it was blunt and crinkly-edged, just like the wards of a key.
“Well, I’m buggered,” said Mr Tanner’s mum. “Looks like Humphrey’s got a soppy streak or something.”
Paul wasn’t so sure about that, but he kept his theory to himself. Having examined the end of the blade, he took a firm hold of the key portion and bent it sideways. The metal was brittle, and snapped. He dropped the key into his pocket, put the sword back in the stone and reattached the washing line
. “One down,” he said.
They still had enough left over from the expenses money to run to a taxi from Wimbledon to Kentish Town. Paul really wished he’d had a bit more notice, since the flat was in its usual state of scruffy disorder whereby a bomb hitting it would count as a make-over, but Sophie appeared to be too wrapped up in the job in hand to notice, and he didn’t really care what Mr Tanner’s mum thought. The second sword came out as easily as the first, and the key snapped off like the tip of an icicle. “Right,” said Mr Tanner’s mum. “Here goes, then.”
So Paul pulled the portable door out of its cardboard tube one more time, and went through the preliminaries of smoothing it out and plastering it onto the wall. When it was ready, he took the first key and tried it in the top lock. It was a perfect fit, and so was its counterpart in the bottom. He straightened up, then hesitated.
“In case anybody was wondering,” he said, “I don’t think it was Humphrey who put those keys there. I think it was somebody else.”
“So what?” said Mr Tanner’s mum impatiently, but Sophie shushed her. “Who?” she asked.
Paul shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Though my guess is, the same person who arranged for each of us to get one. I think the keys were put there so Humphrey couldn’t get at them. That’s why it took the two of us to get them out.”
Sophie frowned. “But that’d mean—well, that whoever it was knew that you and me…And that’s just stupid. I mean, we only realised earlier today, and we’ve had these sword things for ages.” She turned on Mr Tanner’s mum and scowled. “What’s so funny?” she demanded.
“You are,” Mr Tanner’s mum replied. “Bloody hell, it’s been obvious for weeks, the way you two’ve been going on.”
Paul shook his head. “I think it goes back much further than that,” he said. “This probably sounds pretty weird, but I think we were sort of like destined to find these keys. And each other,” he added, going bright pink at the ears. “Not that it matters particularly,” he added briskly, “just thought I’d mention it.”
“Whatever,” growled Mr Tanner’s mum. “But I’ll tell you this. If you don’t get a move on and open this door, you’re destined to get my boot up your bum.”