by Tom Holt
‘Psst.’ Someone was standing on Paul’s foot. Someone very small, because the whisper came from round about elbow height; but someone also very heavy, because his foot hurt quite a lot, and he couldn’t move it for the weight. He looked down, and saw a very short, very stocky little man in a raincoat four sizes too big for him. He was also wearing very dark shades, which he lifted just for a split second, revealing a pair of bright blood-red eyes.
‘You’re a goblin,’ Paul said.
The little man nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘And speak up, I think there’s a bloke on the other side of the street who didn’t hear you.’
‘What? Oh, right, sorry. But you are, aren’t you? A gob—’
‘All right, yes. Actually, I’m your third cousin, eight times removed. Call me Colin.’
‘If you like,’ Paul said. ‘But what’re you doing out here? You aren’t supposed to wander about like this. You should be inside, with the others.’
Colin laughed. ‘Screw that,’ he said, ‘I don’t belong to the colony. Actually, I’m a naturalised human. Like you,’ he added, with a revolting grin.
Paul knew better than to rise to that one. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said. ‘Look, was there something, only I really ought to be getting home—’
‘Bollocks,’ Colin said. ‘I was listening to you and our Rosie just now.’
‘Oh. Were you?’
Colin nodded his oversized, noticeably pointed head. ‘Heard some very interesting stuff about Van Spee’s crystals. About an aspirin-bottleful.’
Paul winced. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I just decided, I’m going to put it back where I got it from, just don’t—’
‘Are you? Oh.’ Colin looked profoundly underconvinced. ‘That’d be a real pity, really, because I just happen to know a bloke who knows a bloke who’d pay top dollar for a few grams of Van Spee’s crystals. Provided that’s what they really are, of course,’ he added, with a slight scowl.
‘I’m pretty sure they are,’ Paul said. ‘Only, that’s what it said on the label, and it was in Van Spee’s desk drawer—’ Maybe, just possibly, he shouldn’t have said that. Too late now, though.
But Colin only grinned a bit wider. ‘Easy enough to tell,’ he hissed. ‘I mean, I could tell you right now, if you happened to have them on you.’
As it happened, the bottle was in Paul’s overcoat pocket, the one without the hole (and if Van Spee knew about the hole, surely it stood to reason - A mental image of the professor, pale and shrunken, hopping around on all fours muttering ‘What has it got in its pocketses?’ slipped into his mind, and took quite a bit of getting rid of). ‘All right,’ Paul whispered back, ‘but not here. People’ll think we’re dealing drugs or something.’
For some reason, Colin seemed to think that was funny, but he nodded his head sideways. ‘Round the back,’ he said. ‘Alleyway, couple of lock-up garages. I got a key. Count to twenty and follow me.’
Paul couldn’t remember having seen an alleyway near the pub, in fact he could’ve sworn it was an architectural impossibility, given the age and nature of the buildings. But apparently he was wrong; there was an alley, small and dark, like an American’s visualisation of Dickens, and halfway down it stood two small garages, so shabby as to be picturesque. The sliding door of one of them was open, and Colin beckoned to him as he approached.
‘Anybody follow you?’ he muttered.
‘Don’t think so,’ Paul replied (the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind). ‘Look, I’m not sure about this. Even if I’m going to keep the stuff, I don’t think selling it’d be a terribly—’
‘Quiet.’ Colin peered up and down the alley a couple of times, then heaved the garage door down and flipped on a light. The garage was completely empty, apart from a few swatches of dusty cobweb swathed across the walls like tinsel on a Christmas tree. If someone had hired Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen to decorate a garage in Furtive Noir, it couldn’t have been more perfect. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s see the stuff.’
‘Look—’
‘Please?’ Now the goblin was doing that sad, beseeching look, like a red-eyed puppy dog. ‘Come on, it can’t hurt, letting me just look at it. And I can tell you if it’s the real thing, or just coffee sugar.’
There was that, of course. Paul was proposing to use the stuff in the recipe; if it turned out to be something else, like strychnine, that the professor had put in the jar as a merry prank, it might be as well to find out about it now rather than later. ‘Oh, all right then,’ he said and fished out the bottle.
The effect on Colin was rather remarkable: a cross between someone finding a thick roll of banknotes in the street and Sir Lancelot kneeling before the Grail. ‘If that’s the real deal,’ he said in a small, wobbly voice, ‘then that’s a hell of a lot of crystals. Mind if I—?’
Paul shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
Very carefully, Colin unscrewed the cap; he paused as though saying grace, then grew a long, thin claw from the little finger of his left hand. He dipped the end of the claw into the bottle and licked it, and his face lit up with a sort of religious glow. ‘That’s the stuff,’ he whispered. ‘Definitely the stuff. All right,’ he went on, pulling himself together with an almost audible snap. ‘Tell you what I’ll do, seeing you’re family and I like you and everything. A million US dollars, cash. What do you reckon?’
It was the look on Colin’s face that made Paul’s mind up for him: that frantic, almost haunted look of unbearable longing and greed. ‘Sorry,’ Paul said, ‘but it’s going back. I just hope the professor hasn’t noticed it’s gone.’
Colin winced as though someone had just stubbed out a cigarette in his ear. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, serves me right for trying to rip off my own third cousin. What I meant to say was, two million. Pounds. For what’s left,’ he added quickly, ‘after you’ve had what you need for your medicine.’
Two million pounds. Two million useless, worthless pounds, because of course he could never spend it; not Paul Carpenter, who’d been sold to JWW and could never quit. Mr Tanner’s mum had said you can buy anything, but she’d been wrong. Paul couldn’t buy anything, because he no longer owned himself—
‘With three million quid,’ Colin was saying, quietly and insidiously, ‘you could do a deal. With them. Our Dennis’s lot. With three and a half million,’ he went on - he was sweating slightly, Paul noticed - ‘you could buy yourself.’
Paul hadn’t thought of that. How much was he worth to the partnership, exactly? He knew how much they’d paid for him, four hundred and twenty-five thousand, enough to buy Paul’s parents their Florida home and their Winnebago. Would three and a half million strike them as a good deal, or not? How could he possibly be worth more than that to anybody? Even on a good day, he wasn’t worth twenty quid and a book of stamps to himself—
‘When I said three and a half,’ Colin said, ‘I was just kidding. Four and a quarter, I should’ve said.’
- But even a real idiot, a worthless clown like Paul Carpenter, knew better than to offer to buy anything from the partnership with their own money; and all he had to do was look into Colin’s eyes to know that the stuff in the bottle wasn’t going to do him any good. Rather the reverse, in fact.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’
For a moment, Paul was sure that the goblin was going to attack; and that’d be that, he thought, goblins being ferocious natural killers, armed with claws like razors and teeth like needles. Instead, however, Colin handed him the bottle and shrugged. A few tiny specks of greyish-white powder were scattered round the neck of the bottle; Paul quickly wiped them away with his cuff.
‘Can’t blame a bloke for trying,’ Colin said. ‘If you change your mind, Rosie’ll tell you where to find me. Look after yourself, right?’
Then he snapped his fingers. The garage seemed to burst like a balloon, and Paul found himself standing outside the pub. The crowd had gone, he was holding an empty glass, in which someone had dropped a
cigarette end, and it had started to rain.
CHAPTER THREE
Getting the crystals in the first place had been easy, sheer serendipity. Putting them back proved to be another matter entirely.
For one thing, Professor Van Spee never left his office. It was one of those things that everybody else in the building (the secretaries, the partners, Mr Tanner’s mum, the cleaners, even the strange mad woman who came in once a month to talk nicely to the computers) knew and he didn’t. Because he’d bumped into Van Spee once in the photocopier room, and then, some time later, been left alone in the professor’s office while the great man went to see old Mr Wells, Paul had assumed he was vaguely nomadic, like everybody else in the building. At the very least, he’d reasoned, he must toddle off a couple of times a day to take a leak. Apparently not so. At one point in the fraught day that followed Paul’s encounter with Colin, he almost made up his mind to confess, but he didn’t. A right fool he’d feel, he decided, if he nerved himself to throw himself on the professor’s mercy, only to find out in mid-air, so to speak, that he hadn’t got one.
The day was long as well as nerve-racking. First, as promised, they dismantled the Emmotson projector, an astoundingly bizarre object that looked like a cross between a bird-scarer and a washing machine, apparently used to isolate moments in the past that marked crucial turning points in courses of events. How it did that, Paul couldn’t begin to guess and the professor wasn’t inclined to explain. Instead, Paul had to crawl about on the floor on his back with a spanner and a set of Allen keys, undoing nuts and bolts, pulling off casings and covers, dodging tiny little springs that came hurtling out like rocketing pheasants every time he undid something, then squirting cans of various cleaners and lubricants into ferocious-looking batteries of cams and cogs and wiping gunk and slime out of slots and keyways with a bit of wodged-up paper towel. It was another hot day, even in the professor’s office, which was always noticeably cooler than everywhere else, and Paul had to stop every few minutes to wipe sweat off his face with his sleeve. What with the sweat and the stale lemonade shandy from yesterday, it didn’t smell very nice and tasted worse; furthermore, he soon developed a thirst that would’ve disabled a hardened desert explorer, but the professor didn’t seem to have heard of coffee breaks or anything of that sort. By the time he’d fitted back the last panel and tightened up the last locking nut and grub screw, his watch told him it was ten past eleven, but he could’ve sworn he’d been playing about with the horrible thing for at least five hours. All that time, of course, the professor hadn’t moved from his chair; he’d just sat there and told Paul what to do, in his flat, slightly bleating voice, with special reference to procedures that Paul had either forgotten or wasn’t to be trusted not to forget. Opportunities to sneak the crystals back into the jar in the desk: none.
At least the next job on the list of things to do was sitting-down work; that, however, was the best that could be said for it—
‘Here is a copy of an agreement,’ the professor said. ‘I have another copy of the same document. You will kindly read it out to me, so that I can check my copy for spelling mistakes and other errors. This is a very important contract, and it is essential that it should be word-perfect.’
So Paul started to read (he hated reading aloud); and mostly to begin with it was just incomprehensible legal drivel, all whereas the parties hereto and hereinafter where the context so permits defined as and other great big galumphing phrases with huge hairy eyebrows and too many syllables. Slowly, though, Paul started to get an idea of what it was about. It was an agreement for the sale and purchase of a soul.
‘Correct,’ the professor confirmed, when at last they’d reached the end, and Paul’s curiosity drove him to ask if his guess was accurate. ‘Ordinarily, spiritual conveyancing is not a major part of the workload of this department. Till recently, the younger Mr Wells dealt with it. However, since his departure -’ here the professor paused for a moment and looked at him, because of course it was Paul’s doing that Mr Wells junior had lost the power struggle with his uncle and been turned into a photocopier ‘- I have looked after such matters. It is tedious work, and I must confess that I have little sympathy for our clients. We generally act,’ he added, deadpan, ‘for the purchasers in these transactions. However, it needs to be done and it must be done carefully.’ He was silent for a minute or so, as he examined the thick wodge of paper in his hand; then he passed it to Paul across the desk. ‘Perhaps you would be so kind as to take this down to the typing pool and ask them to make the necessary corrections by one o’clock. It can then be checked again and bound up, in time for Mr Shumway to deliver it by hand when he goes to the Bank.’
Paul knew all about Benny Shumway’s daily excursion to the Bank of the Dead, since he’d had to do the run himself on several memorable occasions. ‘Right,’ he said, as he stood up, delighted to be able to stretch his legs after sitting still for so long. ‘Um, where is the typing pool, exactly? I don’t think I’ve ever—’
The professor gave him directions, which Paul was sure he wouldn’t be able to follow; to a substantial extent, he believed they were physically and topographically impossible, because there’d be walls and things in the way. But he was wrong as usual. Doorways he’d somehow failed to notice in walls in corridors that he’d walked up and down ten times a day for nine months turned out to be exactly where the professor had said they’d be. Stairwells sprang up at his feet like Jack’s beanstalk at the end of passages that had been cul-de-sacs only days before. There was even a small, square open-air courtyard to cross, a sort of cloister arrangement with a fountain and lemon trees in the middle, in what his sense of direction told him should have been the middle of the building next door. On the other hand, all Paul’s relatives had told him many times that he was capable of getting lost in a matchbox, even if all the matches were still in it, so he guessed he was imagining it.
Eventually he came to a door marked Typing and knocked. No answer; presumably you didn’t knock, you just barged in, so he pushed it open and stepped through; and found himself standing on the tiled edge of a huge indoor swimming-bath.
The walls were blue, the roof was glass, and the whole place looked like something out of one of those underwater nature documentaries. The light danced on the ripples of the water, sending white dots and dashes careening up and down the walls. Instead of the usual chlorine smell, the air was thick with a strange blend of sea-salt, coconut and banana. For a moment, Paul thought the bath was deserted; then, as he was about to turn and leave, something broke up through the still blue meniscus like a whale coming up to breathe.
Fuck a ferret sideways, Paul thought. A mermaid.
She bobbed up and down in the water a couple of times, sweeping her mane of wet brown hair out of her eyes; then she became aware of Paul’s presence, turned and waved. One of the tips of her tail broke the surface of the water, like the fin of a small shark. Mermaids don’t wear swimming costumes, or tops of any kind. Paul spun round and faced the door he’d just come through, his face burning.
‘Hello,’ said the mermaid. ‘I’m Vicky. Who’re you?’
At that particular moment, that was a very good question, because for the life of him Paul couldn’t remember. Somehow he pulled himself together, but it took some doing. ‘Paul Carpenter,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s all right, I don’t suppose you can help it.’ A faint giggle. ‘What are you sorry about?’
‘I didn’t know - I mean, I wasn’t staring or anything, you just sort of popped up, before I could . . .’
‘Before you could what?’
Paul cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I was looking for the typing pool.’
As he said the words, the penny came crashing down like a thunderbolt. Typing pool. The mermaid giggled again.
‘You found it. Have you got something for us to do?’
Paul nodded. ‘From Professor Van Spee. He says, can you please have it ready for one o’clock?’
The mermaid groaned. ‘Not that horrible long contract,’ she complained. ‘I’ve done it five times already. Now what’s wrong with the bloody thing?’
‘Oh, just a few minor bits and pieces,’ Paul said, and for some reason his voice was all wobbly. ‘Won’t take five minutes on the computer—’
‘We don’t use computers, silly,’ Vicky the mermaid interrupted. ‘We live underwater. Water’s not very good for electrical appliances.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, oh.’ He heard her sigh. ‘Big old-fashioned sit-up-and-beg typewriters are what we use, only they’re all stainless steel, so they won’t rust. Which means I’ll have to do the whole rotten thing all over again from scratch. Never mind,’ she added, her tone of voice changing slightly, ‘can’t be helped, and I don’t suppose it’s your fault.’
‘Thanks,’ Paul said. ‘And, um, sorry.’
‘I forgive you.’ Pause. ‘Well?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Would you mind awfully bringing it over here, so I can get on with it? I can’t come over there and fetch it, you see, on account of not having any legs.’
Paul cringed. A part of him told him he was being a bit bloody silly, since obviously the mermaid didn’t mind a bit, and what he’d seen in the split second before he shut his eyes had been very nice. But he was still very much Paul Carpenter; so he made a valiant effort to judge the distance and, eyes still glued to the door, started to walk backwards.
It took a whole ten seconds for the inevitable to happen; then he was falling through the air for perhaps a quarter of a second, and then the water hit him on the back of his head and wrapped itself all round him.
To be fair to him, Paul knew how to swim. He even had a piece of paper somewhere to prove it. But that was proper deliberate swimming-on-purpose, where you take your clothes off and fold them neatly and put on bathing trunks and climb in backwards down a little ladder. Swimming where you’re suddenly submerged in freezing cold water that fills your mouth and ears, and you’re wearing lace-up shoes and a jacket and tie hadn’t been covered in the syllabus when he earned his little piece of paper, and he realised he didn’t know how to do it. Drowning, on the other hand, was apparently something that just comes naturally.