Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  ‘Coming along, coming along,’ Mr Laertides chirrupped. ‘Fuck, where did I just put the litmus paper? Tell me if the stuff in that end flask goes purple, if it does we’ll have seven seconds to get out before the whole lot blows and they start flying in emergency cartographers from the Continent to redraw all the maps. Oh, that’s good, that’s excellent.’ Here, Mr Laertides paused to admire the bubbles rising from a pool of clear liquid in the bottom of a beaker. ‘Told you there was nothing to it really.’

  Paul cleared his throat. ‘Mr Laertides.’

  ‘Frank. Just call me Frank.’

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ Paul said. ‘But I don’t remember any of this from when I copied the recipe out of the book.’

  Mr Laertides grinned. ‘Just as well I stepped in, then, isn’t it? See, that formula was written for the trade, it’s assumed you know how to use it, all the different basic techniques. Like it says, clarify two ounces of mutton fat dissolved in turpentine. Sounds like you don’t know how to clarify. Well, do you? Thought not. I didn’t spend twenty years learning all this stuff just for something to do, you know.’

  Paul could take a hint, especially one which landed with the terminal velocity of a large meteorite. He stood back, stayed out of the way while Mr Laertides worked and tried to keep himself amused by reading the labels of the bottles in the store cupboard. There was aqua regia and aqua fortis, sweet spirits of nitre and salt of wormwood, lunar caustic and oil of Mars and peach ash and pearl ash and calomel, butter and bloom and glance of antimony, bitter salts and blue vitriol, killed spirits, tincture of steel, liver of sulphur and corrosive sublimate, and not a single newt’s eye or frog’s toe to be found anywhere. At the very back of the cupboard, among the wreaths of cobweb and moraines of dust, he found a tiny bottle whose label read Van Spee’s crystals, but it was empty.

  ‘All done,’ sang out Mr Laertides. ‘Complete, finito, come and get it while it’s hot.’ He was holding out a clear plastic pot, marginally bigger than an upturned thimble. ‘I’d knock it back in one if I were you,’ he went on. ‘Probably doesn’t taste too wonderful, I don’t know. I haven’t actually tried it, for obvious reasons.’

  Paul looked at it with a certain degree of horror, then did as he was told. It was only slightly warm, and had no perceptible taste whatever.

  ‘Is that it?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Laertides confirmed. He was red in the face and sweating a little. He’d taken off his jacket at some point and rolled up his sleeves, revealing long, thin white forearms, completely hairless. ‘My guess is, it’ll be about half an hour before it takes effect, and you may feel a bit drowsy, so don’t drive or operate heavy machinery. Aside from that, though, that should be you seen to for at least six months before you need topping up.’ He was putting things away, wiping the desktop, stoppering bottles and jars, dismantling glass and rubber tubing. ‘And the good part is, we’ll be testing it straight away, because there’s bound to be one or two cute chicks at the rehearsal this evening. But now you’ll be able to look ’em in the eye and walk straight past, and that’s one less set of hideous complications in your life.’

  Paul thought about that. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks very much Mr La—Sorry, Frank. You’ve got no idea how much this’ll mean to me. And you’re sure it’ll work?’ he couldn’t help adding.

  ‘You bet.’ Mr Laertides nodded his head four times in rapid succession. ‘Fact is, though I’ve never made this one before, it’s quite like all your basic love-philtre recipes - stands to reason if you think about it - and I’ve been making them for thirty years.’ He’d just put something in his pocket, absent-mindedly and without thinking. Now he paused, frowned, took it out again. ‘Silly me,’ he said and opened his hand, revealing the aspirin bottle still nearly full of yellow crystals. ‘I expect you’ll want to hang on to these,’ he continued. ‘I sort of got the impression that Theo wasn’t expecting to get them back, and you never know when they might come in handy.’

  Paul didn’t make any attempt to take them. ‘Aren’t they, well, sort of valuable?’ he asked.

  ‘What? Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, a bit. I suppose this lot’d be worth a bob or two on the black market. But if you sell them, what’ll you do in six months time, when you’ve got to make the next batch? Up to you, of course, but—’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Paul said firmly, taking the bottle. ‘I’ll make sure I keep them very safe. You, um, you think the professor didn’t mind me helping myself like that?’

  Mr Laertides grinned. ‘The fact that you’re standing there would tend to suggest that,’ he said. ‘If Theo was upset with you, by now you’d be nothing but a memory and a faint smell of burning. Don’t worry, though, he makes the stuff, so there’s plenty more where that came from, far as he’s concerned. What’s the time, by the way? It’s just struck me, I’d better go and get changed if I’m going to this rehearsal thing. Can’t show up at Rosie’s shindig looking like this, can I?’

  Mr Laertides was wearing a plain blue suit. So was Paul. ‘Can’t you? I mean, ought I to change as well? She didn’t say anything—’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Mr Laertides said. ‘What you’re wearing will be the least of your problems.’ He held the door open so Paul could go through. ‘You carry on,’ he said. ‘I’ll just make sure everything’s shipshape, then lock up.’

  Half an hour, he’d said. Paul went slowly down the stairs and made for his office. The brewing process had taken a bit longer than Mr Laertides had predicted, an hour rather than thirty minutes. That left half an hour till going-home time; just long enough for the medicine to work. He sat down at his desk, which was noteless and memo-free, and rested his elbows on top.

  If it works, he thought. If it worked, if only, then it’d be goodbye to a whacking great chunk of the pain of being Paul Carpenter, and wouldn’t that be good? No more falling in love, no more wild, hopeless crushes, no more drifting around bumping into things and absent-mindedly walking through shop windows. No more drooping, sighing, yearning, making an utter and unmitigated prat of himself. He’d be able to walk down the street without needing to look down or away every time a girl came into view. He grinned, as a picture formed in his mind of his arch-persecutor Cupid, who’d hounded him all these years like a chubby pink Captain Ahab, howling at him in baffled fury from his white fluffy cloud. Safe, for the first time since he was eleven. Assuming it worked, of course.

  But if it worked, what a wonderful world this would be. They could do what they liked; girls of every shape, size, height and weight, they could hunt him in packs for all he cared but it wouldn’t do them any good. Just imagine, a world without fear. Only an hour or two ago, he’d been ambushed by Vicky the mermaid, been lucky to get out of that one with nothing worse than a plunge into deep water. Before that there’d been the fake Demelza Horrocks, a hateful trap set for him by Countess Judy into which he’d blundered like a honey-starved heffalump; and before that - before that, there’d been Sophie, and look where that had led. Thank you, he thought; thank you, nice Mr Laertides, even if you are as weird as nine pink ferrets in a blender. If I can be spared another sleigh-ride down the plumbing like that, I can’t ever thank you enough. If it worked, it’d almost be enough to reconcile him to all this magic stuff for ever.

  Almost.

  The door swung open and Paul looked up. For once, Mr Tanner’s mum hadn’t bothered to disguise herself; she stood in the doorway in her goblin face and skin, all long, curved teeth, round red eyes and short bristles. He knew she wasn’t really supposed to walk around like that before the office closed for the evening, and somehow he knew that it was meant as a friendly gesture, like a white flag denoting a brief ceasefire, a short interval during which they could share cups of tea in no man’s land and sing ‘Silent Night’ together until the howitzers started up again. Of course, it was only because he was doing her a favour, coming to her stupid rehearsal.

  ‘Thought I’d make sure you didn’t forget and slip away ear
ly,’ she said, parking herself on the edge of his desk. ‘You tend to do things like that. Tea-bag memory, as my Uncle Howard would say.’

  Paul grinned feebly. ‘How are we getting there?’ he said. ‘I don’t even know where we’re going.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she replied. ‘I’ll make sure you get there. Besides, we aren’t going far. Walking distance.’

  He followed her; down the corridor past the closed file-store, up the back stairs to the photocopier room, along the passage leading to Mr Suslowicz’s office (though last week it had been on the first floor, and now it was on the second), through the staffroom fire escape, which actually led down a tunnel, a marble-faced tube eight feet in diameter going straight ahead and slightly uphill, which if he stopped to think about it was absolutely impossible . . . Down the tunnel for what felt like half a mile, through a massive steel door—

  ‘It’s not much,’ said Mr Tanner’s mum, ‘but it’s home.’

  It was a huge open space; sand-floored, like an arena, circular, the bottom of another vast tube, so tall that the other end, a dazzling blue circle, looked no bigger than a sequin. Paul realised that he was facing the stands of an amphitheatre; row upon row of stone benches raked steeply uphill, almost but not entirely surrounding him. Three hundred degrees of seats, and every single one appeared to have a goblin in it.

  ‘Meet the folks,’ Mr Tanner’s mum whispered in his ear. ‘Just think, every single one of them’s your long-lost cousin.’

  Her claws were gripping his shoulder like a G-clamp, so running for it wasn’t on the cards, unless he fancied leaving his arm behind. ‘Now what?’ he hissed back. ‘You never did tell me what I’m supposed to do.’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t.’

  Then he felt her hand in the small of his back, and he shot forward, scrambling furiously to keep from treading on his own feet. A devastating wall of sound hit him; it was the goblins, all cheering at the same time. Paul had always wondered what it’d be like to be really popular, but in his daydreams it hadn’t been like this.

  ‘You know I told you this was a rehearsal?’ Mr Tanner’s mum whispered in his ear.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I lied. This is the real thing. Not something you can rehearse, if you get my meaning.’

  The rampart of faces staring at him were blurring, melding into one vast composite goblin grin. ‘It’d lose that fresh impromptu edge, you mean?’ he said.

  ‘That too. But think about it. What things are there you can only ever do once in a lifetime?’

  Before Paul could say anything, he sensed that she’d gone, and he stood there, alone in front of maybe twenty thousand goblins, reflecting on the last thing she’d said. Offhand, his mental agility somewhat impaired by the context, he could think of three things that fitted her criteria. None of them were things he’d want to do in front of a crowd, and two of them he’d done already.

  No, belay that. All three.

  Even so. A polished bronze trapdoor, twelve feet square, appeared in the sand in front of him and gradually slid open, with much rumbling of chains and graunching of badly lubricated moving parts. No prizes for guessing which of the three Mr Tanner’s mum had in mind. Something fell at his feet with a thud, just missing his toes; he glanced down and saw a long,wide-bladed sword, with a pink ribbon incongruously fastened around the handle. In this life, he could distinctly remember his dad saying when he was fourteen and asking for the money to go on a school trip to Bruges, there are times when you just have to make sacrifices. Among the goblin community, it seemed, christenings were just such an occasion.

  Help, he thought, but without any great enthusiasm. No point, and it’d be too bad if the last emotion he ever experienced was disappointment. Meanwhile the trapdoor had slid wide open, and up through it on a slowly rising platform appeared—

  A cake. A huge, enormous ziggurat of a cake, with battlements of piped white icing, candles like ships’ masts, spun-sugar bobbles like cannon balls and a single glacé cherry on the top like the dome of the Kremlin. Its bottom tier was fenced around with a silver-foil wrapper as tall as the ramparts of Constantinople, and written on it in prussian-blue letters five yards high were the words Happy Christening Paul Azog Tanner.

  Something you only do once in a lifetime: cut the first slice off a fucking great big cake. Well, Paul thought, of course. Silly me not to have figured it out earlier.

  ‘Go on, then,’ hissed a voice offstage; so he pottered across the sand towards it. It took him two minutes to get there, and he was trying not to dawdle. The crowd had gone deathly quiet; here and there flashguns popped, but otherwise there was no movement in the encircling goblin cliffs. When he reached the foot of the cake, he craned his neck up until it hurt, and still couldn’t see the top.

  Never mind; he was here now, he could do his job and then, presumably, that was his part in the proceedings over with. Deep breath; then he swung the sword up over his head and buried it up to the hilt in the cake wall before him.

  It went in easily enough. Fist-sized shards of white sugar cracked off and rained down around him, like plaster from a ceiling, and around the wound he’d made great cracks and fissures started to appear. Paul dragged the sword free and stepped back; crushed flat by an avalanche of cake crumbs would be a really silly way to die. The cake was definitely starting to split open - he could hear the groans and creaks of stressed fabric, like a great tree torn apart with wedges. Suddenly, in a fraction of a second, the wall gave way; and out through the side of the cake burst a bevy (only word for it) of beautiful young women in spangly bikinis, with tinsel wreaths wound in their piled-up blonde hair. They rushed forward towards him, squealing.

  Goblin taste, he thought; just what you’d expect from a people in whose mythology the sun was formed from the bronzed baby shoe of the sky-god. Utterly naff, but nevertheless harmless enough, in its way—

  Then the party girls were all round him, and Paul suddenly (but too late) remembered the one thing about goblins he’d been sure he’d never ever forget, as the bimbo nearest to him changed seamlessly back into her true shape and swung at the side of his head with a double-headed battleaxe. Somehow he managed to get his sword up to block the slash; he could feel the shock of impact jarring the tendons of his arms right down into both elbows. The goblin hissed furiously through her curved yellow fangs and stepped back to start another swing; meanwhile the goblin next to her was lunging at his solar plexus with a triple-barbed lance. He avoided that too, mainly because his shoelace had come undone and he’d stood on it, and the ensuing stumble took him out of the way of the lance’s needle-sharp point. Unfortunately, as he staggered and fell, a goblin to his right stepped forward and jabbed at him with a halberd, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Paul heard an explosion of cheering as the blade slid into him, and as the light grew pale and the focus softened, his last conscious thought was that, just for once, he appeared to have lived up to someone’s expectations. Well, not lived up, actually the exact opposite, but—

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He was sitting in a chair; a tubular chrome and vinyl one, next to a smoked-glass table, opposite another similar chair, in which sat a bronzed, well-groomed middle-aged man in a blue shirt with a bit of wire sticking out of it. Behind the man’s head he could see a large camera, while overhead swayed a couple of microphones on long steel poles. The man was smiling and staring past him at something: a screen on the wall, where a mob of savage and hideous goblins were stabbing and hacking at some object lying in the dust.

  ‘So, Paul,’ said the man, and the camera started to edge forward on its hydraulic boom. ‘How do you think it went?’

  Paul could feel the corners of his mouth pull apart in a smile, and he heard himself say, ‘Well, David, obviously we’re a bit disappointed with the final result, but we know we gave it our best shot, the lads all done brilliant on the day, it’s just a shame someone’s got to come second, really.’

  The man nodded g
ravely, as though he’d just got a straight answer out of Plato. ‘I’d like to take you through a few of the key moments from the game, Paul, if I may. Let’s kick off with the beginning, shall we? On reflection, maybe not the best start you could’ve got off to.’

  On the screen, Paul saw a hospital ward, a nurse handing a bundle to a woman lying in bed; close-up of his mother’s face (he recognised it from old photographs) then a smart cut across to the ugliest-looking baby Paul had ever seen, wriggling and grizzling and waving its little fists in the air. ‘Well, David, the lads felt the conditions were dead against us, I mean obviously they weren’t what we’d have chosen for ourselves, but that’s the game, you got to play the cards you’re given and just get out there and give it a hundred and ten per cent, which maybe we didn’t quite manage to do on this occasion. But it’s been a learning experience for all of us, and—’

  Now the screen showed a sullen-looking kid in a navy-blue blazer, tie knotted under his chin, standing on his own in the corner of a crowded playground. Cut to the same small boy crouched sobbing in the corner of a large, sparse school bathroom, while a bunch of larger, more cheerful kids methodically flushed the contents of his school bag down a toilet. ‘For me,’ the man called Dave was saying, ‘it was pretty much lost and won here, right in the opening stages, and afterwards you never really had a chance to climb back into the game. Is that a fair assessment, do you think?’

  Paul’s head nodded of its own accord. ‘Absolutely, David,’ he said. ‘Their lads were absolutely magic, can’t take anything away from them, and we’re going to be going over the videos of this stage of the game very carefully over the summer.’ As his mouth moved, a little voice was whispering inside his mind, in the dark corners where nobody ever needed to go: goblin taste, goblin humour, goblin appearances; don’t forget the one thing about goblins you really need to remember. At this point, Paul noticed he was still holding the sword.